"The Abduction from the Seraglio": A not-so-great escape

In the modern world, where etiquette handbooks are passé, and there is always a surfeit of choices of entertainment or food or clothing, a girl has to have a few principles to live by, or else she'll go crazy. Some of my guiding principles: "When in doubt, order a gin gimlet." And, "Life's too short to wear underwear you hate." And, "Don't ever miss a Mozart opera."

The thing about having principles, though, is that they can conflict with the facts of reality. For instance, some bartenders make a really terrible gimlet. Or, you may hate wearing a strapless bra, but maybe that's the only undergarment that works with your new favorite dress. Or, because of the vicissitudes of the opera-house schedule in the city where you live, the first two Mozart operas you see may be lesser works of his, staged and cast in such a way that they feel even more like afterthoughts--pretty little things to fill out the season, rather than highlights of it.

At least, that's what happened to me regarding Mozart at the San Francisco Opera--Idomeneo last season, and The Abduction from the Seraglio this season. No, these aren't Mozart's most profound works (I realized, while talking to my roommate, that the plot of Seraglio would make an excellent Bollywood movie--that's the level of complexity we're talking about), but they contain great music, and I'm sure that in both cases, the productions I saw were not the best possible stagings of these operas.

The Seraglio production took place, for no discernible reason, on a set that resembled an eighteenth-century theater, complete with box seats and painted backdrops (very similar to the Seraglio backdrops seen in the film of Amadeus). I really don't know what this was supposed to represent, though. Nothing else in the staging pointed up the idea of a "play-within-the-play", so why make this choice?

Seraglio is a Singspiel: a proto-musical-comedy that alternates musical numbers with passages of spoken dialogue. The SF production chose to leave the singing in German but translate the dialogue to English--and while I understand the reasoning behind this, the translation was really poor. It alternated contemporary slang ("What's up?" "Whoa there!") with pseudo-classical thee-thou-thy stuff, for an awkward and hard-to-perform hybrid. I also wanted it to be funnier. The author of this translation is one Philip Kuttner, who a Google search reveals is primarily a conductor*; I wish it had been entrusted instead to a professional writer with an ear for dialogue. There are a lot of underemployed playwrights in this town, and I bet some of them even know German!

Because of the English dialogue, a cast of American and British singers performed the opera. No superstars, but a few good voices, most notably tenor Matthew Polenzani as Belmonte. It's just a pity that he had to play the least interesting character in the opera!--Belmonte has lots to sing, but it gets dramatically inert. Mary Dunleavy, as the heroine Constanze, had really unpleasant high notes in her first aria, so instead of looking forward to her performance of the magnificent Act II aria "Martern aller Arten," I dreaded it. Though it turned out not to be as badly sung as I feared (and I liked her acting, which showed Constanze starting out unsure of herself but gaining in power as the aria progressed), I still don't think that this is an ideal role for her. In the role of Blonde, the soprano Anna Christy fared better: her voice is small but pleasant, and her sassy soubrette characterization charmed the audience.

The Pasha, a non-singing role, was performed by local actor Charles Shaw Robinson, who also failed to impress me. His speaking voice sounded gruff and hoarse, and he was saddled with most of the awkward thee-thou-thy dialogue. To my surprise, the audience spontaneously applauded the Pasha when he announced, at the end, that he would forgive the four lovers and not perpetuate the cycle of hatred. But then the final moment of the production tried to make us feel sorry for the Pasha, proposing that he genuinely loved Constanze but nobly renounced her--the wrong way to conclude an opera about silly antics in a Turkish harem, methinks.

*OK, my search revealed that Kuttner also writes supertitles for the SF Opera--but I'd argue that there's a big difference between writing supertitles (which need to convey the general meaning of an opera's libretto, but never need to be spoken aloud) and writing dialogue that will be performed.

Images from SF Opera. Top: Anna Christy, with "eunuchs." Bottom: Matthew Polenzani.

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."

"Idomeneo" in Golden Handcuffs

Last Tuesday I went to the San Francisco Opera to see Idomeneo, my first time ever attending a live production of a Mozart opera. And while I often think that Mozart makes everything better, this Idomeneo proved to me that even Mozart's genius is not enough to compensate for a relatively dull libretto and staging. Not that the production was embarassingly bad--it was just over-decorous and polite. Nor do I mean to suggest that only transgressive Regietheater productions are relevant in this day and age. But an opera production has to have some freshness to it, and some serious thought about "how can this old work speak to us?", rather than relying on stock ideas of beauty and tradition.

I knew I was in for a pretty but lifeless production from the first scene, which features Ilia, a captive princess, lamenting her fate. But she's wearing one of the most exquisitely rich and lovely gowns I have ever seen, and around her wrists are a pair of dainty golden handcuffs. This is supposed to be a poor orphaned prisoner? To me, this is a betrayal of the libretto, not as shocking but just as wrong-headed as that infamous German production of Idomeneo that depicted the severed heads of Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad onstage.

Not that the libretto of Idomeneo is the greatest thing, in any case. The witty opera blog The Reverberate Hills cites the "lack of onstage sea-monster action" as a reason to dislike Idomeneo, and while that's kind of facetious, there's also some truth to it. When a sea monster is supposedly terrorizing and eating the citizens of Crete, Ilia comes onstage singing "Gentle breezes, tell my beloved that I adore him!" It's prettified rather than dramatic.

Idomeneo does have some powerful scenes based around its central conflict: King Idomeneo promises to sacrifice to Neptune the first living thing he encounters after he survives a shipwreck, but that turns out to be his own son, Idamante. Too much of the story, however, is told via monologue and soliloquy, instead of dialogue and ensemble. In the subplot, Princess Ilia and Princess Elettra both sing arias about their love for Idamante and their jealousy toward their rival--but if it was up to me, the women would confront each other in a catfight!

Only two of the four major singers in the San Francisco production really impressed me. Tenor Kurt Streit gave a thrilling rendition of Idomeneo's tour-de-force aria "Fuor dal mar." Sometimes his voice sounded almost as though he was belting, which maybe isn't "proper" operatic technique, but was very exciting. He also was a strong actor: at the end of Act One, as the citizens sang a chorus of thanksgiving that their king had returned to him, you could see Idomeneo's struggling to perform his kingly duties while knowing that he had to sacrifice his son.

Meanwhile, Genia Kühmeier, who sang Ilia, was simply a lovely and graceful performer in every respect, with a clear and warm soprano voice and the ability to play a sweet ingenue role without coming across as fakey. The beginning of Act II, with Kühmeier's aria "Se il padre perdei" leading into Streit's "Fuor dal mar," was one of my favorite stretches of the opera.

On Tuesday night, I saw an understudy in the role of Idamante: Daniela Mack, one of the SF Opera's Adler Fellows. (Alice Coote, the scheduled singer, had injured her back.) When I heard Mack sing at the Opera in the Park concert, I thought "She seems nervous. She needs to warm up more. Her vibrato is all over the place." And I had the same impression seeing her as Idamante. Granted, she was probably nervous, but in her first aria, her vibrato was very prominent and made her singing sound approximate rather than spot-on. She did get better as she went on, but still, it bothers me that both times I've heard her, she didn't sound ready when she stepped onstage.

Iano Tamar, as Elettra, looked the part of the haughty and vengeful princess, but vocally, she wasn't a good fit. Her voice got weak just when it should have swelled with urgency at the climaxes of her arias. Also, her last aria is basically a hissy fit about how everybody else got a happy ending while she is left to suffer, and the director decided to have her tear her clothes in rage. Unfortunately, like everything else about this production of Idomeneo, the gesture was overly polite and muted. Elettra ripped at a panel on her overskirt that had been designed to come away--but it was only a single gesture, choreographed rather than deeply felt. I realize I was probably spoiled by seeing Natalie Dessay act and sing up a storm as Lucia di Lammermoor, and not everyone can do that--but still!

In the end, I think that those golden handcuffs Ilia wore in the first scene provide a perfect metaphor for this production of Idomeneo. They're nice to look at, and they're not painful, but they're still shackles, restricting freedom of movement and putting a damper on the proceedings.

All photos by Terrence McCarthy, San Francisco Opera. Top: Kühmeier as Ilia. Middle: Streit as Idomeneo. Bottom: Tamar as Elettra.

In Praise of Papageno

People are talking about a new mini-trend on Broadway: writers and composers appearing in their own shows. Of course there's Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen from [title of show], but also Lin-Manuel Miranda in In the Heights, Stew in Passing Strange, and Harvey Fierstein in A Catered Affair. Miranda and Fierstein are playing original characters (tailored to suit their own personalities), while Stew and the [tos] gents play themselves, or versions thereof.

This kind of thing is relatively rare on Broadway, but even less common in the opera world, because an even higher level of skill is needed to sing opera than to sing in a musical. In fact, I can think of only one librettist who starred in an opera he wrote: Emanuel Schikaneder, who wrote The Magic Flute and then played Papageno. Are there any others?

The role of Papageno is thus kind of an anomaly in the operatic repertoire. Schikaneder obviously fit the role to his own talents (he was known for playing a Papageno-like comic character named "Hanswurst") but plenty of other singers have found success in the part. In fact, Papageno can easily steal the show and make Tamino seem stiff and boring by comparison. Because Schikaneder was not a virtuoso singer, Papageno's music is simple, rhythmic, and sits in the middle of the male vocal range (lyric baritone). But that means that you're likely to leave The Magic Flute humming one of Papageno's arias (well, that or The Queen of the Night). And despite its limited vocal range, the Papageno/Papagena duet is absolutely glorious, isn't it?

Papageno is a coward, he tells lies, he fails Sarastro's tests, and yet, for all his flaws, he remains lovable. I always feel sorry for him during "Bei Mannern" because he and Pamina harmonize so beautifully in praise of love, but she's already promised to Tamino, and he hasn't found anyone yet!

Though Papageno yearns to get married, he's not a stereotypical innamorato. And though there are other comic baritone roles in the repertoire, they're not Papageno clones. For instance, the Birdcatcher is entirely sweet-natured, lacking the angry streak of Mozart's Figaro; and he's not especially clever, unlike Rossini's Figaro. Yet he's good at his job, loyal and kindhearted, and knows he'll be a great husband and father. He is Everyman, raised to the level of the sublime.

From a strict dramatic standpoint, Papageno doesn't do enough in the plot of The Magic Flute to justify the size of his role, but I can't imagine the opera without him. He keeps things lighthearted when they threaten to get ponderous, and allows Mozart to illustrate one of his favorite themes: forgiveness. At least 4 earlier Mozart operas--Abduction from the Seraglio, Così fan Tutte, Nozze di Figaro, Clemenza di Tito--end with scenes of forgiveness, and The Magic Flute continues the pattern: though Papageno fails Sarastro's trials, he still gets to live happily ever after with his dream woman. The Magic Flute ends by recognizing both the prince Tamino and the commoner Papageno as worthy men--one of the reasons it is the quintessential Enlightenment opera.

Though Papageno began as a way for Emanuel Schikaneder to entertain his fans, he ended up one of the most appealing characters in opera. I wonder what other unique roles would be in the operatic canon had more librettos been written by singers and actors?

Image is from the silhouette-animated film Papageno directed by Lotte Reiniger in 1935. Credit: tuebingen.de