Hoffmann; Frankenstein

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TO THE THEATER three times last week, with results pondered ever since.

First of all, were we really at the theater. In fact we were at the Rialto, in nearby Sebastopol, one of those big bland shoppingmall movie-theater complexes (though this one is not really in a shopping mall). Is the room in which you watch moving pictures projected onto a two-dimensional screen, accompanied by unnaturally close, loud, and equally two-dimensional sound, really a theater? Theater implies space and spaciousness. Literally, of course, since it descends from θέατ�ον, "viewing place," the word's correctly used for movies. But still.

Especially when the thing viewed is, as was the case last week, a video recording of a live performance on a stage. I generally dislike these filmed-for-your-remote-delectation efforts, as I've noted here in the past:

In the end, I don't think I saw legitimate theater. The performance may have been real-time, but on the screen, whether in close-up or depicted on the full stage, the look of the characters is flat. Further, there's a confused sense of audience: you're aware of the live theater audience, but much more aware of the real people around you in the cinema. Worse yet, you're aware the actors are completely unaware of you: you're eavesdropping on a theatrical dialogue between actors and their own, real audience, more privileged because actually present before the stage.

But last week the repertory trumped media-determined objections, and we went to the Rialto. (And why are movie theaters so often named "Rialto"? Another distraction.) A play based on a favorite novel was one of the items; a favorite opera was the other.

We saw both versions of thew National Theatre production of Nick Dear's play based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the great 19th-century novel on the ethical implications of human intervention in natural creation — implications eternally central to the problem of human nature. The play is necessarily smaller than the novel: it omits Shelley's masterful framing device (though of course the theater itself, surrounding the performers, makes a substitute), and the geographical nature of the distance between Geneva and Ingolstadt, where young Victor Frankenstein produced his Creature, is utterly lost. (So, too, the distance between the classes is lessened, though Dear makes up for this by enlarging the role of Elizabeth's maid.)

And we saw this filmed play twice, because the leads, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, alternate in the roles of Frankenstein and his Creature. This was a brilliant concept of Danny Boyle, who directed the production with a good deal of his own genius, integrating Dear, Shelley, his principle actors, and Mark Tildesley's fine sets (and Bruno Poet's marvelous lighting) into a thoughtful, deep, yet gripping work which managed to be as arresting on the second viewing as it had been only two nights earlier.

Interestingly, Cumberbatch made the Creature overpowering and magnificent in revenge; Miller made Frankenstein sympathetic and likable in his quandary: and when the roles were reversed, so were the effect, and the Creature became the victim of the tragedy, the Doctor the evil perpetrator. I'm sure Shelley intended this dual reading, which emerges readily enough from her novel; and I'm equally sure both versions of the play must be seen for that point to emerge from the theater — pointing out the greater richness of ambiguity (or, better, complexity) on the page than on the stage.

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Between those two filmed presentations we saw the Metropolitan Opera production of Jacques Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, an opera I've dearly loved since first encountering it in the early 1950s via Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's movie version, which impressed an adolescent greatly and irreversibly. It's quite unfair how the memory of many details of this film production, perhaps inaccurate since I've not seen it in sixty years, has often heightened inadequacies of staged productions seen over the years.

This Met version has so many triumphant notes that its few inadequacies are the more unfortunate. Most of them are attributable to the director, Bartlett Sher, who seems too influenced by (and devoted to) production values more characteristic of the contemporary Broadway musical than to those of the opera stage. Both the Olympia and, especially, the Giulietta acts were drowned in fussiness and detail, almost swamping Hoffmann, Offenbach, the profundity of their creation, and worst of all perhaps the triumphs of the central actors.

Those were, first, Joseph Calleja, whose tenor voice was accurate and expressive and whose physical acting was very persuasive in the title role. Secondly, to my taste, Kate Lindsey, a remarkably effective Nicklausse/Muse: in this production the role is elevated to a central, motivating position, fully projecting the opera's deep insight into the profundity of Hoffmann's tales as they probe recesses of human psychology.

If you want a review of the production, I suggest Anthony Tommasini's from the New York Times of a few years back, when this production was filmed. In that review, Tommasini mentions the sorry uncertainty any production must present of a score Offenbach died before ever hearing. In a later column he discusses the approach the Met's music director James Levine (who conducts this production magnificently) took to the problem.

I'm not persuaded by the result, but I left the, um, theater thinking we'd seen/heard as good a version as we're likely to ever in this life — greatly, I think, because of the intelligent prominence of Kate Lindsey's portrayal. Les contes d'Hoffmann is a deep, rich, complex, meaningful work of art, one of the greatest operas in the repertory, the product of a rare moment when observation, expression, and artistic means converge in examination of what it means to be human. It may be that the sixty-three years between Mary Shelley's 1818 novel and Offenbach's 1881 opera (odd that they should be numerical anagrams!) represent the lifetime during which such examination was so intriguingly possible.

It may also be meaningful that the beginning of that "lifetime" should have been the product of a nineteen-year-old young woman, and that its end should have been that of a crippled, dying man. Shelley's novel, it seems to me, represents a perfect mediation between the Rationalist observations of Jane Austen and the psychological probings of Henry James. E.T.A. Hoffmann's writing of course defines a central expanse (and a fascinating one!) of Romanticism. Offenbach — well, what to make of this curious man, perhaps the Erik Satie of his time.

Tony Judt: The Memory Chalet

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Last month I read the massive, discursive, utterly fascinating Thinking the Twentieth Century, an extended conversation in which Timothy Silverman assists the tragically mute and paralyzed (Lou Gehrig's disease) historian-intellectual Tony Judt to reflect on the world which he is about to leave as it has been left in its turn by the dismal failings of the century in whose middle he'd been born.

I can't write about that book here: it's too big, too complex, too important — and not at had: I made the mistake of reading it in a library copy.

After recording those conversations, though, later transcribed and edited into the final version, Judt produced one more book, a memoir in a series of self-described feuilletons called The Memory Chalet (London: Penguin Books, 2010). The title refers to his method of composing these essays, which accumulate steadily in depth and importance: in his long wakeful nights he composed them, organizing their paragraphs and mentally stowing them at this site or that in a country hotel fondly remembered from his youth; then the following days retrieving them, one by one, and dictating them to an amanuensis.

The writing itself is always graceful, rather conversational, informal, yet elegantly contoured and distributed. (It reminds me of other work similarly made: for example, the paragraphs of Alberto Moravia's first novel Gli indifferenti, or — very different — the visions recalled and re-stated in Sam Francis's lyrical, light-filled paintings.)

But skillful, artistic as his expression is, it is Judt's substance, concepts, insights that make his work in these books so significant — imperative, I would say. His observation is detailed and retentive; his intellectual organization of the results is careful and logical; his conclusions, it seems to me, both inescapable and utterly persuasive.

His training was the result of a fortunate confluence of opportunity and ambition, tempered by a healthy amount of typical adolescent male curiosity and adventure; and much of The Memory Chalet is a dying man's retrospection on the luck that made his career. Central: the conviction that meritocracy and social democracy, which underlay his own development, represent the best possible organizing principles of contemporary society.

Literally central to his book: Meritocrats, a chapter describing his education at King's College, Cambridge, in the 1960s, where John Dunn

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history, He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect.
   That is teaching. It is also a certain sort of liberalism: the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting (or simply mistaken) opinions across a broad political spectrum.

It is in discussions like this — listening and responding — across positions, even mutually exclusive ones formed by individual awarenesses based on conflicting allegiances, that enlightenment can occur. Such conversation is at the heart of social democracy, which can only obtain in a context subordinating partisan doctrine to greater collective good.

Before King’s College, Judt was a youth influenced by Marxism and Zionism; King’s cured him of those enthusiasms by introducing him to greater responsiveness to observed historical fact and keener analysis of the means by which specific political objectives might be achieved. He concentrated first on issues of French political history as it responded to Marxism, studying at the Ecole Normale. One thing and another led him to lectureships in the United States, at Davis and Berkeley among others. A “mid-life crisis” was met not with the purchase of a sports car or the acquisition of a trophy wife but with the determination to learn Czech, and he investigated the fascinating, sobering political and philosophical history of Eastern Europe later in his career, which ended in the pages of The New York Review of Books, among other publications, where he was by the early years of this century a public intellectual, avoiding partisan allegiances in order to take reasoned, pragmatic positions on the great issues of our time.

There are many ticks in the margins of my copy of The Memory Chalet. Let me simply quote out a few of the passages:

• On education:

Universities are elitist: they are about selecting the most able cohort of a generation and educating them to their ability—breaking open the elite and making it consistently anew. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not the same thing. A society divided by wealth and inheritance cannot redress this injustice by camouflaging it in educational institutions—by denying distinctions of ability or by restricting selective opportunity—while favoring a steadily widening income gap in the name of the free market. This is mere cant and hypocrisy. (page 145)

• On words:

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication.” (p. 152)

• On America:

For Milosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the East European in the face of Western innocence. (p. 180)

• On “Captive Minds”:

Milosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” (p. 175) “Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a good-natured idiot.” (p. 176)

• On failure of western intellectuals to dissent from, e.g., Bush’s “hysterical drive to war just a few years ago”:

Few of them would have admitted to admiring the President, much less sharing his worldview. So they typically aligned themselves behind him while doubtless maintaining private reservations. Later, when it was clear they had made a mistake, they blamed it upon the administration’s incompetence …they proudly assert, in effect, “we were right to be wrong”… (p. 178) … “Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1930-1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.” But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). (p. 179)

• On identity politics:

Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large. (p. 189)

Judt sadly shakes his head at the increased attraction of abstraction, the diminished concern for pragmatics, among journalists, academics, politicians, and the public at large. Unthinkable things happened throughout the Twentieth Century because of that confusion of social values. For a few years after the end of World War II, chiefly in western Europe, it looked as if a meritocracy of social technocrats might prevail, but the end of Communism, in 1989, gave way not to Social Democracy but the return of “free-market Capitalism.” Judt died, of ALS, very soon after completing The Memory Chalet; it stands as a fond, generous, often funny appreciations of the good events of his life and mind, but also an elegy on the premature relinquishment of the power to further such events. Ut tempora, ita homo.

Bachelor Machine

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IF YOU'VE VISITED this blog before you're no doubt aware of my long-running infatuation with La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, the chef-d'oeuvre Marcel Duchamp abandoned in 1923, which has since attained the status of legend within the annals of Modernism. He had worked on it for ten or twelve years; I worked on it longer, ultimately to an even greater degree of futility.

One of the by-products of this infatuation, in the category of musical composition, was my first piano sonata, composed mostly in 1983 and 1984 while working on the opera I was slowly finishing up. A long ballet dominates the middle of the second act, the center of the opera: it was conceived as representing the mechanical workings of the Bride and her Bachelors, with solo material given, respectively, to violin and piano.

This sonata is the piano material, lacking all other music (solo and choral singing and orchestral accompaniment) but fleshed out slightly with additional notes. (The violin material went into a concerto, about which I recently posted here.)

There are two intentions in this sonata: to make an extended, somewhat virtuosic piece of music for solo piano, and to retain the arbitrary, quirky, stiff characteristic of Duchamp's conception. The part of the bachelor apparatus that is most present is the "chariot" or "glider," a contraption that comes and goes in a reciprocating movement, sounding its "litanies" ("slow life: everyday junk: onanism: buffer of life") and actuating an elaborate train of machinery which ultimately fails to strip bare the bride.

The three movements are called Cadre, Desires and Frustrations, and Action and Inaction. I wouldn't mind finding an English word for the title of the first movement, but nothing quite does what the French cadre does: framework, context, grouping...

The music of the Sonata can also make a fairly substantial Piano Concerto, a Big Concerto to complement the Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, but it hasn't yet been notated, except as part of the Duchamp opera. Perhaps one day.

Sonata: Bachelor Machine was first played by Eliane Lust, July 25, 1990, in San Francisco, on a wonderful program also including Debussy's Hommage à Rameau, Bartók's Sonata, 1926, and Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. What a night! You can watch the incomparable Eliane play one movement of the sonata online.

I've finally prepared what I think is a fairly decent edition of the score of Sonata: Bachelor Machine, available at Lulu.com: click here to order a copy.

Also online: you can hear and purchase an mp3 of the sonata, as synthesized from the score. (At that same site, you can now buy tracks of various pieces of chamber music; more about them in the future, perhaps…)

Shakespeare in Ashland

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Ashland, Oregon, July 26, 2012—ROMANCE; TRAGEDY; HISTORY; three of the four major categories of the Shakespeare canon, seen within thirty hours, on two of the three stages maintained here by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And seen in productions of varying degrees of success, in my opinion. The problem, as always in this country — I know nothing of Shakespeare productions elsewhere — is the degree of comfort the producing team has with the presentation of these plays to these audiences. How is Shakespeare relevant, or approachable, or (let's face it) marketable in 21st-century United States of America?

Harold Bloom has his own comment on the problem of Making Shakespeare Approachable:

Most commercial stagings of As You Like It vulgarize the play, as though directors fear that audiences cannot be trusted to absorb the agon between the wholesome wit of Rosalind and the rancidity of Touchstone, the bitterness of Jaques. I fear that this is not exactly the cultural moment for Shakespeare's Rosalind, yet I expect that moment to come again and yet again, when our various feminisms have become even maturer and yet more successful. Rosalind, least ideological of all dramatic characters, surpasses every other woman in literature in what we could call "intelligibility."Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 209-10

The summer of 2012 is not yet the cultural moment Bloom has in mind, not to judge by this year's production of this great Romance; and it was again partly the fault of a single character, Touchstone — here directed to sitcom comedy (like the Romeo Nurse, overwhelming the "rancid" subtleties. All of Shakespeare's romances depend partly on comparisons, contrasts, and collisions of class; but it is what each class representative has to say about the others that is informative and interesting and ultimately useful. In broad attempts to use these contrasts primarily for their entertainment value this informative value is lost.

Too, the language suffers. Too often the actors seem to take little pleasure in the marvelous poetry they are given (even, in Rosalind's case, in prose), as if they're self-conscious about it. Lines are thrown away, or mumbled, or mouthed, or made difficult to register because of absurdities of aural scale caused by the shrill yet bland music in this production, or the alternation of shouts and murmurs. Like Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It contains scores of lines whose beauty brings tears to the eye, even though they're familiar as clichés: today's actors need to trust the poetry, whose familiarity is due after all to its power, not merely the repetition across the centuries which is testament to that power.

The whole first half of this production labors to overcome its unfortunate opening, with a banishment scene made to look absurd rather than cruel. I almost left at intermission. Afterward, though, as would be the case the next afternoon, the production settled in, and Shakespeare shouldered directorial Concept aside. Bloom is right, I think; Rosalind is a magnificent creation. She could converse wittily with Hamlet and Prospero, and the conversation would be rewarding for its substance. Jacques, too — the role set on a woman actor in this production, and why not? — has a mind far subtler and more meaningful than is often thought to be the case (even Bloom seems to neglect her), and is beautifully portrayed here, almost as if to apologize for the overblown Touchstone.

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It doesn't help my present mood, on the subject of these productions, that I've just read David Crystal's engaging book Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2005), an account of his work preparing the cast of the London Globe Theatre for a series of performances of Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare's own language, Early Modern English, at it was most likely pronounced in London at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. The book strikes me as most interesting and useful to anyone concerned about the plays, the author, the productions, and the performances; I'm sure most professionals in the area are familiar with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been read fairly closely by Laird Williamson, who directed the performance we saw yesterday afternoon.

One of Crystal's points, in his short and entertaining book, is that the "authentic" reproduction of the sound of Shakespeare's English does not render the play more remote to today's audience. (I set "authentic" in quotes, but Crystal writes persuasively to explain just how we can know how the language may have sounded.) In today's London, four hundred years later, the linguistic climate turns out to be remarkably similar to that of Shakespeare's day: lots of accents, lots of languages, all present simultaneously, influencing one another at times, revealing differences in ethnic, class, economic, and geographical background.

Williamson's production of Romeo and Juliet transposes the action from early Renaissance Italy to California in the 1840s, when it was in its sad devolution from a Mexican state to annexation by the United States. The Capulets and Montagus are feuding landholding families, the Prince is a U.S. Army general in command of the area. You hear the familiar lines in mostly modern English, with Mexican, Spanish, Afro-American, and east-coast educated accents; often Juliet's father lapses into Spanish when talking to his wife, daughter, or various servants.

The play survives the transposition well; I think it likely does make its relevance to our own time and place more immediately clear to contemporary audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare. (Not with the story, of course: what tragic love story is better known?) Where West Side Story brings the play to our own context — successfully, I think — this production mediates Shakespeare's setting and our own context through this clever Californification, paralleling the playwright's secondary purpose — his examination of societal mores as they defeat their own intentions — by training the same examination on both our own time and one in the recent past centered on many issues again in the public moment (class, ethnic background, pride, gangs…).

But the playwright's primary purpose is not to instruct, but to entertain, and here this production, like too many productions of Shakespeare, is too often exaggerated, out of scale. No question that the Nurse is often a comic role; but she has serious things to say: in this production the audience is early trained to think of her as little more than a stereotype, and she's rarely taken seriously. Mercutio should be talkative, deft, mercurial; here he's mainly loud.

Fortunately, Mercutio doesn't survive into the second act (there is only one intermission in this production), and after its irresolute opening the production settles into its directorial concept and Alejandra Escalante's portrayal of Juliet becomes more complex and more attentive to the book. In general, it's as if the cast begins to take the text more seriously, as offering real and thoughtful material for them to convey to the audience. And the close, as always, is poignant and affecting.

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We come now to Henry V. I do not like this play, as Bloom does not like The Merchant of Venice, so I'll admit to an inability to see or discuss or think about it rationally. I know there's a case to be made for an ironic intent behind it. Henry V is like Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony: its tone must be destroyed in its performance if its real meaning is to be conveyed. You would think, then, that a company used to damaging the tone of Shakespeare's plays would find a brilliant approach to this history: but this summer that doesn't really happen.

The play centers on the young king's successful invasion and seizure of much of France, the result of the pivotal Battle of Agincourt, and in its conclusion on Henry's arranged marriage to the trophy princess Catherine of Valois. There are, God knows, memorable events and moments in the early scenes, but in this production, presented out of doors in the Elizabethan Theater, they were uniformly grey and unappealing, as if the intention were to rob war of any glamor. The frivolity of the French court, a running joke among the British, brought the only moments of light and deftness, and the graceful humor attending Hal's courtship of his dubious "Kate" seemed to offer a civilizing note to what had until then been relentless and glum.

These three plays were undoubtedly chosen with ensemble in mind. England seizing France; the U.S. seizing California. Generational conflicts and commentaries. Spanish, French, Scottish and Welsh accents. Finally, the civilizing effect of romantic love, which resolves conflict by giving in to biological urgency. There is always so much to contemplate here; it hardly matters that irresoluteness and economic realities momentarily blur the perception of Shakespeare's immense and complex landscape.

As always, I deny any attempt here to "review" these productions; there are plenty of reviews on the Internet. Casts and credits are also on line, along with performance schedules:

• As You Like It: Elizabethan Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon; closes October 14.
• Romeo and Juliet: Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 4,
• Henry V: Elizabethan Stage; closes October 12.

Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera

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Mozart: La finta giardiniera (The pretend gardener), K. 196 (1774) Nardo: Gordon Bintner Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest Podestà: Casey Candebat Belfiore: Theo Lebow Ramiro: Sarah Mesko Arminda: Jacqueline Piccolino Serpetta: Rose Sawvel conducted by Gary Thor Wedow directed by Nicholas Muni Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, August 2 and 4, 2012 The Merola Opera Program San Francisco Opera

Eastside Road, August 3, 2012—NO LOVER OF MOZART can afford to ignore La finta giardiniera, an opera at the exact emergence of the Romantic music drama from its Baroque and classical sources. Mozart was a month shy of his eighteenth birthday when he traveled with his father and sister from Salzburg to Munich in early December, 1774. Someone — we're not sure who — had obtained a commission the previous summer for the opera, which Mozart apparently began working on in September.

The libretto, probably by the Roman poet Giuseppe Petrosellini, was taken verbatim from an earlier opera of the same name, by the now-forgotten Pasquale Anfossi. (It had premiered a year earlier, in December 1773, in Rome.) It's in many ways a stock item, with three couples from three social classes (nobility, courtier, servant) and an aging comic majordomo-type animating a plot given to disguises, mistaken identities, tangled courtships. (One recognizes elements from commedia dell'arte, and prefigurations of Così fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro.)

A significant aspect of the libretto, though, is its preoccupation with madness. Insanity, both feigned and temporarily real, permeates many arias and ensembles; it's remarked on by the characters; it's even reflected in some of Mozart's orchestration. Irrationality was a frequent subject of attention during the Age of Reason, and while Petrosellini's libretto is pure comedy, and Mozart's setting in his own description pure opera buffa, there's a subtext here that makes me think of, for example, Tom Stoppard theater, where heightened intellection reveals the irrational undertones of otherwise apparently explicable behavior. Let Robert W. Gutman set the scene:

The opening tableau of… La finta giardiniera had already given notice of fatigue with the masquerades and hollow nostalgia of the aristocratic world. The curtain rises upon a seeming Edenic haven of security, a garden in which five protagonists sing together of bucolic contentment. Then, one by one, they reveal their true feelings, dissecting their emotions in a series of short solos telling of hidden sorrow, furious jealousy, and both unrequited and unwelcome love. Having disclosed the pain and eroticism beneath the idyllic surface, they reassume their public postures in a repetition of the beginning ensemble, now revealed to be a fiction… the scene becomes a travesty of the affected and already old-fashioned pastoral opera, a comment upon the nature of so-called reality, and an indication of the growing stress between directness and reserve, between the spontaneous and the formal.
Mozart: a Cultural Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); pp. 123-4

La finta giardiniera is a portrait of transition: from feudal to republican social orders; from post-Baroque pastoral comedy to the Romantic drama of Mozart and da Ponte; from the symmetries and harmonic simplicity of Classical music to the expressive gestures and tonalities of Romanticism. Little wonder the opera was neglected in its day, disappearing after three performances. Gutman again:

…Wolfgang determined to impress Munich and went astray because at the same time he determined to impress himself no less. In a miscalculation born of divergent desires — on one hand, a desperation to carry the city by storm, on the other, a dizzying hunger to make the most of his freedom from the musical restrictions of Salzburg, so stifling to his inclinations — he fabricated an overambitious score rich in stylistic contrarieties and with finales of a complexity beyond anything a Galuppi, Piccinni, or Gassmann [his rivals] had attempted.
Op. cit., p. 340

Mozart returned to the score five years later, cutting and revising the score to conform to a German translation of the text. It was probably presented once or twice in 1780, and again in 1789, when it was still failed to find favor. "More for the conoisseur who knows how to unravel its refinements than for the dilettante… nearly always difficult… in the highest degree tasteless and tedious", run phrases quoted in Robert Gutman's book.

I've listened to the opera a few times in the recording contained in the Brilliant Classics integral recordings of the Complete Mozart — a box of 170 CDs I wouldn't want to be without. The recording was made live at the Monnaie in Brussels in 1989, and I find it more rewarding than does Robert Levine, for example. I have not studied the score, available online as a free download and (for money) on paper as reprinted by Kalmus: when I get a few days, I will.

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The reason I'm writing about La finta giardiniera this morning is simple: there's one more chance to see and hear this beautiful, complex, rarely performed opera, in a faithful and entertaining production, in San Francisco, where the Merola Opera Program is presenting it, sung in Italian with English supertitles. We heard it last night, and I thought it was superb. The young cast had clearly spent a lot of time preparing their roles, and they sing clearly, musically, with good intonation.

Nicholas Muni's direction seemed both resourceful and uncommonly intelligent, and all seven of the singers can act, facially expressive and gesturally effective. They often have business even when silent; they accomplish this tellingly, filling out their roles without upstaging other characters. Jealousy, despair, tenderness, insanity — all are readily communicated, often with subtlety. There is broad humor, of course — send-ups of stock medical jokes, for example. But nothing is ever uncontrolled; the fun never goes over the top; you can laugh without losing track of more serious (or at least more interesting) subtexts.

Gary Thor Wedow's conducting was energetic yet generous, and he and his orchestra brought out Mozart's rich colors and textures. La finta giardiniera enjoys its own score: in his first aria the Podestà (the comic Don Alfonso-like character presiding over the action) refers to the dulcet flutes and oboes, the somber violas, the violent trumpets and drums: Mozart is pointing up his orchestrational skills here. There are some surprising harmonic transitions in this score: Wedow presented them urgently. Elsewhere he instructed strings to play sul ponticello, underscoring the dramatic tension.

The singers are young, strong, attractive, and nimble. I won't single anyone out: every one of them was utterly persuasive in the role. There's a lot of fioratura in Mozart's score, which recalls vocal writing as distant as Handel's between stretches of pastoral lyricism. All seven singers negotiated quick passagework, leaps across the range, quick alternations of piano and forte, rarely failing to articulate the text clearly.

La finta giardiniera is a long opera: even cut — this production suppresses a few arias — the evening ran over three hours, with one intermission following the first of the three acts. I didn't find it overlong, and the cast didn't show any signs of fatigue either. We ran into them celebrating in a local bar-restaurant after the show, at midnight: a convivial scene. Youth, talent, enjoyment, energy; and Mozart: who can resist?

Further on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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Eastside Road, August 9, 2012—
(minor corrections August 10, 2012)RECENTLY I WROTE about

the degree of comfort the producing team has with the presentation of [Shakespeare] plays to these audiences. How is Shakespeare relevant, or approachable, or (let's face it) marketable in 21st-century United States of America?

A pair of plays we had yet to see when I wrote that post throws the problem into sharp relief. Shakespeare's histories and certain of the "problem plays" are deep examinations of the motives determining individual behavior in societally pivotal, even crucial moments. They are about political events, never more so than in Troilus and Cressida, a disturbingly deep and bleak psychological portrait.

And Robert Schenkkan's All the Way is a similar portrait, though more narrowly focussed: on the first hundred days of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when his powerful political determination pushed civil rights and anti-poverty legislation through a recalcitrant legislature.

The relevancy of Schenkkan's play is obvious to audiences of my age, of course: we remember those days, and see parallels between those issues and others facing us today. (In fact, of course, among today's issues are the continuation of Johnson's "Great Society.") We can hope that the near term of All the Way makes its significance clear even to young audiences today, though I suppose we shouldn't take this for granted.

But how make the issues behind and within the Trojan War meaningful to today's audiences? This production of Troilus and Cressida updates the action, as the director, Rob Melrose, explains:

Our production takes inspiration from the looting of the Baghdad Museum during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We are overlaying a modern perspective on an ancient story. Like the layers of Shakespeare's sources, we are seeing the Trojan War as the beginning of a long history of East-West conflicts: the Persian Wars, the Crusades, the Vietnam War, the Gulf and Iraq Wars. In the detritus of war are reminders of the cultures that were here before.

This is a little confused, I think. Melrose's third sentence needs a bit of unravelling. To be fair, it has its own source earlier in his program note, where he cites Shakespeare's "obscure sources known only to scholars": Homer, Chaucer, Boccaccio.

In many ways, this play is a collaboration among Shakespeare and his three literary equals across time. The result is a richly layered text that constantly revises and comments on its source materials.

But the result is, after all, a Shakespeare play, a finished work of art (as is Chaucer's magnificent psychological novel Troilus and Criseyde); it can stand on its own merits. To add to its already rich store of historical, legendary, and literary references even more — ranging from the Crusades to the pillaging of the Baghdad Museum! — is hardly likely to make the play simpler or more direct.

Except, in fact, by shouldering aside much of the play's content — details revealed in the character's lines — by a constant substitution of contemporary references: machine guns, helicopter chop, sirens, cocaine and drug-sniffing. Pandarus is portrayed as a situation-comedy funny uncle; Helen as brainless sexpot, Cassandra as an inexplicably troubled aunt who shows up in her head-scarf from time to time for no particular reason.

Only Shakespeare's language is truly respected, not his take on the content it expresses. This has its absurd results, as when sidearms that are clearly handguns are referred to as swords, or when GIs look heavenward when referring to the gods. To dismiss these absurdities as unimportant, because after all realism is hardly the point, is to overlook the greater issue they reveal: by making Troilus and Cressida "relevant" to an audience familiar with Afghanistan and Iraq but not Chaucer or Homer, productions like this divest the play of Shakespeare, furthering the cultural illiteracy they want to counter. The look and sound of this production, growing largely out of television and movie portrayals whether of battle or poolside languor, renders the sound of Shakespeare's dialogue quaint and often opaque.

So ultimately this is not Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, but someone else's. The main points of the play are there: war is absurd, there's little honor among these people; we really ought to stop behaving this way. But Shakespeare's complex and fascinating characterizations are little more than caricatures, and so the effect of the play is repetitious and heavy-handed. Shakespeare had more subtle things in mind than a morality play — he always does. If the richness and depth and, yes, subtlety and ambiguity of his work has to be sacrificed to make him understandable by today's audience, it would be better not to present him at all — to consign him to the obscurity which this Festival apparently believes already conceals Homer, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.

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I'M TEMPTED HERE to investigate some clever branching format to give you your choice: shall we turn next to the mess that is Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, or the success of All the Way?

All the Way, Robert Schenkkan's play about Lyndon Johnson, is conventional drama, tightly focussed on LBJ as he takes office in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose very different style — Massachusetts, glamor, wealth — has until then marked the vice president as little more than a country bumpkin. Or so thinks LBJ, who is/was, in fact, a sensitive, intelligent, apparently sympathetic politician, hampered by his often crude expression but clear-eyed and realistic when it came to the political process. The play…

Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was so unpleasant a production that we left at intermission, so I really have no business at all writing about it. Once again, then, let me turn you over to the codirectors' program note: Almost 30 years ago, as a college student, Bill wanted to learn more about theatre that speaks to a cross section of society… Taking one example of each of the three great populist movements in Western drama… he laid three texts side by side. With all three plays staged in the sae space at the same time, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was born. The trouble with this idea is that…

Oh, the hell with it, clever formatting has no place here — though it shows what happens when a clever idea gets in the way of trying to get to the bottom of something. Let's continue with All the Way, which really impressed me for its skill in keeping a number of parallel lines in balance, continuingly present through the three-hour two-act play, persuasively depicting a large number of familiar, complex, interesting characters: Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Lady Bird Johnson, George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover, Hubert Humphrey, Robert McNamara, Walter Jenkins (LBJ's top aide)…

All these men but the last are well-known to those of us who paid any attention at the time; and the time was of course the middle 1960s, at just the cusp between JFK's New Frontier and the cultural revolution attending the rise of the Vietnam War, when the excesses of the youth movement severely compromised the success of the "Great Society" that LBJ was trying to engineer.

It was a time resonating with the current moment, when many of the programs and legislative codes put in place in the 1960s are being attacked, and there's a very real danger that they may even be repealed. I'd hesitate to call Schenkkan Shakespeare's "literary equal," as Rob Melrose refers to Homer, Boccaccio, and Chaucer: but he's a similarly telling and ingenious playwright. I was impressed by his By the Waters of Babylon, staged at OSF in Ashland in 2005; Handler, which centers on a snake handling church in the Appalachians, had played there in 2002. Those plays deal with societal confrontations between groups with dramatically opposed, tightly held attitudes; All the Way is a logical continuation of the theme.

Bill Rauch, the Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare, directed both those previous Schenkkan plays, and he directed All the Way as well. I don't see how he could have done it much better. The parallel politics of LBJ's administration, the recalcitrant Dixiecrat-driven Senate Byrd, Thurmond, Eastland, Russell), and the emerging civil rights movement, itself split between judicious elders (King, Abernathy, Wilkins) and the impatient youths (principally Stokely Carmichael) were beautifully balanced, orchestrated you might say; and the fact that many of these supporting roles were double- and triple-cast was no detriment: not only costuming and makeup, but acting and directing kept a complex set of issues on point and abundantly clear.

There's humor here, though one audience member groused that for people of her generation J. Edgar Hoover could never be a sympathetic character, let alone amusing. I found him both, in fact; I thought he was better treated than the hapless Hubert Humphrey, the one historical character who didn't seem quite right.

The frequent humor, concentrated on near-fools like Humphrey and Hoover (the characters, not the real men!); the double-casting to populate a wide gamut of types and classes; the interweaving of political and individual power-juggling — all this is of course very Shakespearean. Of all the plays I've seen so far in the "American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle" series commissioned by OSF, it is the most Shakespearean, resonates best with the historic mission of this theater company.

(We did not attend a second new play commissioned within the cycle, Party People, a performance by the UNIVERSES collective. That was a mistake: I've heard very good things about it. We'd been misled by the title and early publicity; when we ordered our season tickets, we thought to save money on both this and an update of The Merry Wives of Windsor. We were right only half the time: perhaps we'll return for it later in the season.)

All the Way only opened a week or so before we saw it, but this was a solid production and performance. It was so absorbing I could imagine returning for a second look. It should join the repertory, I think; I'd be surprised if it didn't turn up in the Bay Area sometime in the next few years.

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CAPABLE OF A SUCCESS like All the Way, how could Bill Rauch make a theatrical mistake like Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella? I have no right to "review" it, as I left at intermission — along with five friends with whom we spend a week in Ashland every summer. (The fourth couple had wisely opted to sit this one out.)

The idea was intriguing, a mash-up of characters from three widely different settings somehow interacting in a new context. Euripides'Medea has beckoned me since hearing the Judith Anderson performance, recorded, sixty years ago, and the Scottish play was still in my mind from the beautiful and relentless production at OSF in 2009 (and the oppressive yet compelling production of 2002), and the production of Akira Kurosawa's retelling of it as Throne of Blood in 2010.

I had assumed for some reason — well, for no good reason at all, of course — that the Cinderella would come from a fairly serious staging of that familiar tale: based on, say, Charles Perrault, or the brothers Grimm, or perhaps Jacopo Ferretti's libretto for Rossini's opera La Cenerentola. Wrong: Rauch turned to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally produced for television. I've never seen that version, I'm happy to say: judging from the little of it I saw in Ashland in this production, it's annoyingly cartoonish and simple-minded, brash and foolish.

Years ago it occurred to me, while watching a production of Charpentier's opera Louise, that you could make a charming and thoughtful thing of a Paris-themed opera in which Louise and her father, Mimi and the others from Puccini's La Bohème, perhaps Donizetti's Maria di Rohan (which I've never seen or heard), and of course characters from Offenbach's La vie parisienne all bump into one another — in the streets, at a café, perhaps at a dance. They'll have a lot to tell each other, I think. If I were to do it, there'd be pauses and quiet passages. the sources would not merely co-exist, often competitively; they'd intersect, aware of one another, bringing further layers of thoughtfulness and meaning — and, yes, humor along the way, as well as sympathy.

Perhaps that happens in the second act of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella. If so, perhaps someone will tell me about it. I'm afraid I didn't linger to find out. Instead I left the theater, confused and a little irritated at the money spent by me, the much more money and time and energy spent by OSF, and the implications that the Artistic Director of the theater has taken advantage of the splendid actors and other resources at his disposal to stage what was, in fact, a college student's idea, now, according to his program note, "a lifelong passion project."

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FINALLY, A PARAGRAPH or three on the ancient Kaufman and Ryskind send-up Animal Crackers, written for the stage in 1928, adapted into film two years later. It's the latter that's well known, of course, because of the presence of the Marx Brothers, who repeated their stage roles.

It's surprising, now, to recall that Animal Crackers is a musical. There are some fine songs, particularly "Watching the Clouds Roll By" and "Three Little Words," and of course both Chico's piano and Harpo's harp were given prominent solo "specialties". The OSF production involves an onstage combo: piano, trombone, reeds, bass, and drums, and they were first-rate. In general I've liked OSF's occasional musical — The Guardsman and She Loves Me come to mind — when it's done fairly straight; this was no exception to that.

But the musical is the least aspect of the show. What Animal Crackers is, in this production, is a zany romp of a comedy, with lots of debt to vaudeville. I don't like to linger on performer descriptions in these accounts, but I have to comment on the actors who, in representing Captain Spaulding, Emanuel Ravelli, The Professor, and Horatio Jamison, have to represent also Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo. Not long into the evening you forgot they weren't the Marx Brothers themselves. The show was hilarious from beginning to end, and I wish I could see it once a month for the rest of my life. Go see it if you possibly can.







• Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare; directed by Rob Melrose): New Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon; closes November 4.
• All the Way (Robert Schenkkan; dir. Bill Rauch): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 3.
• Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (Bill Rauch and Tracy Young, adapted from Euripides, Shakespeare, and Rodgers and Hammerstein; dir. Rauch and Young): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 3.
• Animal Crackers (Kaufman and Ryskind/Henry Wishcamper; dir. Allison Narver): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 4.

Fun to cadres, cryptic sound

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OUR SKINS ISOLATE our bodies from the matter surrounding them, but provide sacks for the uncountable millions of organisms whose unknowable agendas and interactions compose our physical selves. We are each of us a corporation, not an individual.

Our minds, however — they take the other direction, defining each of us as a component, an infinitesimal part of a galaxy of thoughts, memories, concepts, phrases, not-yet-imagined operas, forgotten epics, lost philosophies.

I owe that realization to a book read thirty years or so ago, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences). I'll have to dip back into that soon; I'll let you know what I find.

Having taken far too long a vacation from other blogs I've enjoyed in the past, and being sequestered in a quiet room in the Sierra with neither computer nor television, and no desire to deal with anything requiring more than a few minutes' attentiveness, I've just visited Dan Visel's magnificent With Hidden Noise, inspiring for its intelligence, invention, and discipline.

Let me draw your attention to one superb invention, his re-statement of Henry James's novel The Sacred Fount. 

(It doesn't hurt that I've just read a fascinating book about Oulipo, which I promise to report on when I've access to a more efficient conceptcatcher than this iPad.)

With Hidden Noise is among other things a blogquivalent of a commonplace book. I take that as a practical inspiration, and add here, as the first in what may prove to be a long string of such items, a paragraph that struck me recently:

"My countrymen," said Mistral, when I saw him in Maillane, "are not slaves like the men of Nice and Cannes who sell their soil to foreigners, or to syndicates from Paris and lose all individuality and freedom. We, on the contrary, have each our own land and home, our liberty and independence from  our own toil, and therefore we have kept the local character of our old Provence. Fools prefer similitudes. They understand them better. When they see differences they try to smooth them down to the monotonous level of their own low instinct. The wiser man loves difference; difference ind dress, in speech, in life, in looks; difference that has given Provence the loveliest women of all France in some other towns, the handsomest men in others."
—Theodore Cook, Old Provence, p. 62; Jan. 18, 2012

reformatted August 17, 2012