The Ghosts of Versailles

The 2009 Opera Theatre of St. Louis season is now over and it ended on a high note with the newly commissioned re-orchestrated The Ghosts of Versailles.   Although I usually avoid reading reviews of the operas before I attend (and even try to avoid reading the synopsis so that I can "be surprised" by stories I don't know) I did my homework on this one.   This opera was originally staged at the Metropolitan Opera by Colin Graham, the artistic director of OTSL from 1985 until his death two years ago, and I knew it was important to OTSL to get this "smaller" version commissioned and performed.  So I wanted to go into it understanding it as much as possible.  

What I expected was that I would get what I often got with a Graham-produced opera:  a spectacularly staged and acted production, superb voices, perfect balance between voice and orchestra ... and music that I didn't particularly care for.  Graham fully supported 20th century composers. I give him credit for that.  I appreciate 20th century opera much more from having listened to years of it at OTSL.  But I have a hard time with it.  I can't just sit back and enjoy it as I can with Verdi and Mozart and Puccini.  

And sometimes, try as hard as I might, I just can't sit through it.  It tires me out, because I am trying so hard to understand it, and by about 10:00 on a Thursday night I can reach my limit. Fortunately many modern operas are short.   But I knew that The Ghosts of Versailles  was not short - it was a standard three hour opera.

So last Thursday I arrived at my seat wondering if I would make it through John Corigliano's music or if I would be sneaking out at intermission.   The first twenty minutes was not promising.

I don't know enough about styles of 20th century music to be able to talk intelligently about them.  In some ways they all sound alike to me and they often fall into what I call the "whiney opera" category.  The music is in minor keys, there is no discernable melody, it all sounds angst ridden and ... well ... to my ears it whines.  The first half hour, as the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI and Beaumarchais wandered around a palely lit set, dressed in shades of gray with white hair, singing with a lot of angst,  made me feel certain that I would not last beyond intermission.  The voices were beautiful.  They were performing the music wonderfully.  The set was interesting. The costumes and makeup were ... ghostlike.   The orchestra was not overpowering.  But.  I just don't like the style of music.

And then everything changed.

The plot of The Ghosts of Versailles is complicated.  Marie Antoinette is an unhappy ghost; she believes that she was innocent and unjustly executed and she can't get her untimely end out of her mind.  Louis XVI keeps telling her to lighten up.  The ghosts of many other French aristocrats who went to the guillotine are also wandering around.  The ghost of the playwright Beaumarchais has fallen in love with Marie Antoinette and he decides to cheer her up with a new opera, an opera that will re-write history and make her live again. 

Beaumarchais waves his hand and his old familiar characters appear on the little stage at Versailles dressed in non-ghostlike colors with non-ghostlike lighting:  Figaro, Susanna, the Count Almaviva, his wife the Countess Rosina and Cherubino.  Yes, the cast from Beaumarchais' three plays about Figaro - - one of which was set to music by (among others) Rossini as The Barber of Seville and one of which was set to music by Mozart as The Marriage of Figaro.   Corigliano loosely uses the third Figaro play, in which all the characters are 20 years older, as his opera-within-an-opera in The Ghosts of Versailles.

At that moment The Ghosts of Versailles came alive despite it's ghostly cast and it never died for the rest of the night.  It was a fabulous production.   In the opera-within-an-opera Count Almaviva decides to rescue Marie Antoinette with the aid of his servant Figaro.  But Figaro suddenly states that he will not help the queen.  Beaumarchais, shocked that his character is staging a revolution, decides he himself must take the stage and set Figaro straight.  He enters the production much to the astonishment of Figaro and Susanna (who are YOU? they ask when Beaumarchais appears on stage.  I am your creator, he declaims in a musical homage to Don Giovanni.)   Beaumarchais gets things back on track by having Figaro witness the trial of Marie Antoinette which is a kangaroo court at best.  And Figaro realizes that she was set up and had no chance.  In the end they are able to save the Queen, but Marie Antoinette at the last moment decides that history should not be changed and she allows herself to be beheaded again.  She returns the love of Beaumarchais and there is a happy ending.

I enjoyed it.  I even enjoyed the music (well, most of it) as Corigliano added allusions to Mozart's operas in the opera-within-the-opera which were fun to catch.  This is an opera that has ten main characters and most of them sang brilliantly, especially James Westman as Beaumarchais and Christopher Feigum as Figaro (I do love baritones).   Sean Panikkar as Almaviva sang very well.  Elizabeth Batton stole the show as the Turkish performer Samira who rode in on a camel that looked like it was stolen off of an exotic carousel and then sang and belly danced, with Figaro behind her in disguise as a harem girl.  Maria Kanyova sang a fine Marie Antoinette (it isn't her fault that the music she was asked to sing was my least favorite in the entire opera; but even though I didn't like it I acknowledge that she sang it well).  Her portrayal of Marie Antoinette was touching although I found such an emaciated looking ghost a little distracting.   Michael Christie conducted and he is another conductor that I would like to see come back to OTSL, I truly enjoyed watching him in the pit.

It was a little long.  I understand that they cut a half hour out of the original production but I think they could have cut more.   I would have cut the corps de ballet numbers, the stage at the Loretto Hilton is too small to really appreciate them.  I also would have cut the love duet between the young lovers Leon and Florestine.  In my opinion love duets between young people never really work in modern opera because the music is just too angst ridden to make for believable young love.  So they should only be done if it is absolutely necessary to move the story forward and in this case it wasn't.

But, even running slightly too long and even with the "whiney opera" music,  I really enjoyed it.  In the first twenty minutes  I found myself wondering why 20th century composers so seldom found anything fun to put in opera and why they so seldom composed comedies.  And then Corigliano proved to me that he can compose comedy as well as anyone. Thank goodness.

This production is a co-production with the Wexford Festival in Ireland and Vancouver Opera, and it will travel to the Wexford Festival in October and the Vancouver Opera in November 2011. As I read the reviews that are coming in I realize that the opera world is  watching this production closely to see if a scaled down version of Ghosts will work.  The full production is too expensive for most opera companies and in fact the Met canceled its own revival of the "big production" that it had scheduled for the 2009-2010 season ( Kristin Chenowith was to have played the Turkish performer Samira which would have been something to see.) I think the small production worked very well so, hopefully, this opera will be accessible to more audiences in the future.

Here is the Trailer where you can see the costumes and the set.  There is also a documentary that is very interesting about the production and how it was designed.

Now that the season is over I can say that I think it was one of the best seasons I've seen in my over 20 years as a subscriber.  I say that despite the disappointing La Boheme.  The productions of Salome, Il Re Pastore, and The Ghosts of Versailles were stellar and each season has one opera I am not wild about.  Plus, this year three out of the four weeks that I went had spectacular weather in which to picnic on the lawn.  This was the first full season under the direction of the new production team (only Stephen Lord, the musical director, is an old hand) and I whole-heartedly applaud them.   The out-of-town reviews are trickling in:  Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times.  

And this:

It is quite possible that Opera Theatre of St. Louis is the leading summer opera destination in the United States.

There. I said it. Let the Glimmerglasswegians and the Santa Fesions rail and fuss, but OTSL has really got the whole package together: top quality musical offerings, exciting young singers well on the road to major careers, well-considered theatrical stagings that rival any major house (any), and an extra-musical ambiance that is just about unbeatable. Approaching the house through the lawn area profuse with candle-lit tables, free to any pre-show picnickers who care to use them, and being able to stay after the show to party, applaud, and mingle with the artists in the large Fest tent, well, it is sort of Glyndebourne without the ‘tude.

Add to the mix the fact that this troupe has consistently performed their repertoire in English, in a small house that fosters great immediacy of the theatrical experience, at competitive prices, and, good God, it is 'popular' opera! (Even when the title is not of the bread-and-butter variety). True, the Loretto Hilton lobby is cramped on SRO evenings but. . .there is always a stroll available on that candle-dotted lawn.

Next year we will see Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin, both of which have been done by OTSL before (Figaro a number of times).  We will also see "the directing debut of famed designer Isaac Mizrahi with A Little Night Music, and the world premiere of a spectacular new family opera, The Golden Ticket. "   You should come.

Don't be Fooled Again

Near the end of May, Errol Morris published a seven part essay in the New York Times called Bamboozling Ourselves (Part One is here) that is well worth reading. He discusses two new books that have recently been published about the painter and forger Han van Meegeren. He also uses van Meegeren's story as a jumping off place to think about a lot of interesting things including the concept of people letting themselves be fooled. Not uneducated, stupid people; people who should know better.

Here is Morris' synopsis of van Meegeren's story:

Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.

Not everyone believed him. The New York Times, in its 1945 story, said:

The director of the Rotterdam Museum said the prisoner was a fantasist who had a grudge against museums and similar institutions. A painting restorer in The Hague said that if one of the disputed works which he transferred to new canvas recently, “Pilgrims to Emmaus” [“Supper at Emmaus”] was indeed a forgery, then the painter must be considered a genius in that particular line.

To prove that he, indeed, painted the paintings he claimed to have forged, the authorities actually requested van Meegeren to do one more painting under their supervision. As Morris points out, this painting was not a forgery because he wasn't passing it off as anyone's work but his own.

The series of essays is thought provoking because part of what Morris discovered about forgeries is that it is not just the forger who is perpetrating the fraud; many other people are unwittingly complicit in the fraud because they want the story to be true. The customer wants the "discovered" painting to be real and most of the time doesn't even ask that it be tested. Sometimes the authenticator of the painting has his own agenda and wants the painting to be real. And, Morris meditates, this complicity occurs in frauds other than paintings.

The essay (and the follow up blog post More Bamboozling in which he responds to comments) is well worth reading.

But I found myself, in reading about van Meegeren and his trial, thinking about a work of fiction: Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone. In Davies' novel, a Canadian painter working as an art restorer in Germany before the war is asked, as an exercise, to paint a painting in the style of an old master and to do it so that no one can tell it was painted in contemporary times. The exercise is meant to help him as an art restorer - the goal of a restoration to be as un-noticeable as possible. He paints the painting and it is judged a success. He also discovers that he loves painting in this old style and where he was only a mediocre modern painter he is very good at painting in the older style. But of course there is no market for that style.

The plot turns when he is forced to flee Germany during the war and the painting is left behind to be discovered after the war when art work stolen by the Nazis was being recovered. The "exercise" painting is identified by experts as an old master. The Canadian painter does not step forward to reveal the truth but in staying silent he dooms himself to never paint again. At this point in his life he cannot bring himself to paint in any other style and he knows that any painting he does will be too revealing.

One of the questions the novel explores is whether the painting, which is judged a masterpiece when it is thought to be hundreds of years old, is not a masterpiece when we know it to be only 50 years old. What is it that makes a work of art a masterpiece?

Curious about some of the similarities in the stories I did a little quick and dirty research on Davies' novel and discovered that, indeed, the story of van Meegeren was in Davies' mind when he was writing the novel and one of the characters is indeed based on van Meegeren. Davies' alludes to the question that van Meergen asked at his trial: "Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders. Art lovers from around the world paid money to see it. Today it is worth nothing and people would not cross the street to see it for free. It is the same picture. What has changed?"

Morris says that it is the change in provenance that matters. Davies thinks it is the fact of fallibility that changes the perception of the art. Davies says that fakes scare us because experts "of all kinds are our modern priests and we want to think them infallible."

Morris is fascinated by the idea that high priests can be fallible. He isn't interested in the common man but in people who should know better and who allow themselves to be fooled. As Morris writes in Part Five of his essay, we see what we want to see despite masses of information to the contrary:

We live with a glut of information. More information than ever before. And yet, we see so very little. The same human mechanisms that operated thousands of years ago still operate today. If we don’t wish to know something, if we prefer to believe something that’s false is true, there is little that prevents us from doing so. Invariably, we prefer fantasy to the truth.

As part of his essay, Morris interviewed the authors of the two new books and then followed up with e-mails. One of them, Jonathan Lopez, e-mailed the following:

We now live at a time when a lot of smart people have fallen prey to expertly packaged lies … I think that the Van Meegeren story has unusual resonance at this particular moment for that reason. I think, actually, that this is why we have two books coming out on this subject at the same time. There’s something false in the air.

Ultimately, I believe that it’s extremely important to understand how reasonable people can be led into misjudgments — even truly awful ones … That’s why I ended “The Man Who Made Vermeers” with Göring’s quote to Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg.

Morris gives us the quote from Göring:

Why, of course, people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war… That is understood. But it is the leaders of the country who determine policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along… The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It is to the complicity of the collective that Morris finally turns in his essay, raising questions about the Dutch population during the war and what he calls the Alice in Wonderland like aspect of the accounts of what happened that were written after the war.

As I say, it is a thought provoking essay not only about art but about life. I recommend it.

Two Mysteries

I've been reading a lot of reviews of Scandinavian mysteries lately so when AndiF lent me a sack full of "BritLit" for the summer I was pleased to find a Scandinavian mystery inside. Missing, by Karin Alvtegen (translated from Swedish by Anna Paterson), was published in 2000 and won Scandinavia's best crime novel of the year. It was nominated for an Edger here in the US this year.

I read it almost straight through without stopping. The protagonist is Sybilla who we meet in the restaurant of an upscale Stockholm hotel where she is apparently trying to pick up a single male diner at the table next to hers. Is she a prostitute? Is she a con artist? No, she is homeless, and trying to have someone pay for a nice hotel room for her where she can take a bath before she returns to her life on the streets? Fortunately the gentleman pays for her room. Unfortunately he is found murdered the next morning and she was the last person seen with him. So her previously anonymous life on the streets is disrupted by her "wanted" status.

I won't give away the ending, but Sybilla is an interesting character that you don't often see in novels. She comes from a wealthy family in which she never felt accepted. Although she has chosen to live a life on the streets rather than live with her family in reality her choice to disappear and become invisible to the Swedish social welfare system means that she has no choice except to live on the street because to do otherwise requires a govt. ID number by which she can be traced.

The mystery portion of the novel is good although I thought the ending was a little forced. But I recommend it. I can't decide if it is better summer reading or winter reading (Sweden always seems like a winterish place to me).

Also in the sack of books was another mystery, Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves. Like Sybilla, the protagonist of this story, Lizzie Bartholomew, is also something of a lost woman, starting out life as an abandoned baby who is placed with English social services. Now an adult social worker, she is drifting after some kind of traumatic incident that has forced her to leave her job. In Morocco she has a one night fling with a married man that ends up having unexpected repercussions.

This book kept my attention but I didn't like Cleeves' style that much. Where Alvteger's story telling was pinpoint sharp and tightly focused, Cleeves' story is all over the place as Lizzie tells (parts) of her story to other people and to herself and as she experiences nightmarish flashbacks that eventually give us the whole story of the traumatic incident she lived through. I can't say that I anticipated the ending completely but it wasn't wholly unexpected.

If I could only read one of these books, I'd enthusiastically recommend Missing but I'd skip Burial of Ghosts.

This and That: Dance, Mystery Novels, Blog Comments and Movie Architecture

Some stuff:

Dancer/Choreographer Merce Cunningham has announced that his company will be disbanded after his death because "he thinks his dances have a better chance of surviving over the long haul if his associates concentrate on making them available to other companies instead of keeping his own troupe going."  Terry Teachout writes in the WSJ that this is the most "significant dance-related piece of news to come along in years."

Ian Rankin retired his famous detective John Rebus but he's not retired from writing.  His new detective is Malcom Fox and Rankin auctioned the opening pages of the first Malcom Fox manuscript for charity.  The novel is set for release in September.

I decided to put Sarah Waters' new novel, The Little Stranger, in my pile of vacation reading.  A few weeks ago Waters wrote a column in  The Guardian in which she discussed the relationship of this novel to Josephine Tey's mystery novel, The Franchise Affair.  I read all of Tey's novels years ago and I'm thinking of digging out The Franchise Affair and re-reading it.  But I can't decide whether to read it before or after The Little Stranger.

I got a chuckle out of  post by Scott McLemee at ArtsJournal in which he clarifies that he doesn't think the problem with online communication is too many people thinking they are important or thinking they are part of the conversation.  No, the "issue is people acting like assholes."   Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up.  I'm pleased that my commenters have (so far) been the exact opposite. :)

Finally, Architect's Journal recently selected the top ten star wars buildings.   What do you think?  I've always wanted to visit the Cloud City, I would have ranked it higher.

Buffy v. Edward

This very clever remix has been going around for a couple of weeks.  I've never seen or read Twilight but if Edward really is this creepy I don't get the appeal. 

And is there any doubt who wins?

Rumor says there is to be a new Buffy movie but Joss Whedon won't be involved. I don't know how I feel about that.  On the one hand, it just seems dumb.  There was one movie.  It wasn't successful.  What was successful was the TV series.  Going back to movie format seems like a waste of everyone's time.  On the other hand, other successful TV franchises were turned into successful movie franchises.  Star Trek.  Spiderman.  Batman.  

Or not.

I'm still trying to decide if I should read Twilight.  I'm just as ambivalent about that as I am about the Buffy movie.  Sounds like a waste of time from a literary point of view.  Lots of people I know have read it and talk about it so to the extent it is a social thing it isn't a total waste of time. 

Or not.

Il Re Pastore

The third production in my Opera Theatre of St. Louis subscription series was Mozart's Il Re Pastore which was composed when Mozart was only nineteen. I had never seen (or heard) it before but it was Mozart so I knew I'd enjoy the music even if the production bored me. But the production was riveting.

 

First the story.

It takes place in ancient times right after Alessandro the King of Macedonia has overthrown the tyrant of Sidon. Alessandro is searching for the rightful heir of Sidon while Tamiri, the daughter of the overthrown tyrant, is waiting to find out what will happen to her. As the story opens Aminta, a young shepherd, is in love with a young woman named Elisa and they plan to marry. But then Alessandro determines that Aminta is the rightful heir of Sidon. So Alessandro's sidekick, Agenore, whisks Aminta away to teach him how to be king and Alessandro decides that Aminta will marry Tamiri. Tamiri, though, is really in love with Agenore, who is also in love with her.

 

Lots of confusion ensues (but not really comic confusion) as the two sets of lovers sing of their angst. Lots of emoting about the conflict between love and duty. Finally Alessandro is convinced to let the couples that are in love marry and there is a happy ending.

 

The music is beautiful and the voices were perfect. Heidi Stober sings Aminta. This is her OTSL debut and I want her back! (Yes, she is a woman singing a man's role. It's called a "pants role" and Mozart and other composers used this often when the character was supposed to be a young man. It can be very confusing.) Her soprano is clear and warm and her diction perfect. Maureen McKay sang Elisa and her soprano was bell-like. I've heard her before and enjoyed her performance but she was outstanding this year. The men, Alek Shrader as Alessandro and Paul Appleby as Agenore, were outstanding, particularly Shrader. Daniela Mack rounds out the cast as Tamiri and her mezzo was warm but clear.

 

The music itself is ... Mozart. Glorious. Although there is, as with most Mozart, a lot of repetition that can get a little tedious if it is not in capable hands.  That was not a problem with this production. Unlike later Mozart operas, Il Re Pastore is not an opera with trios and quartets that make things a little more interesting. Mostly each singer would sing an individual aria, followed by a responsive aria by another singer. Sort of like a cantata. It is not until the end that all five protagonists sing together. That part was exquisite as the voices were perfectly matched. Conductor, Canadian Jean-Marie Zeitouni, is a newcomer and is also someone else I want back again. His orchestra and his singers did not fight each other but blended in a perfection of notes that almost made one forget there was an orchesta.

 

Sometimes this type of opera ends up being a musically brilliant but visually uninteresting evening. But not this night. Director Charles Rader-Shieber and set designer David Zinn worked together to create a show-within-a-show. The set is a late Victorian/Edwardian country home where a woman and her new fiance are entertaining guests for the weekend to celebrate the engagement. Servants in black are serving tea and dusting and setting flower arrangements in the background. The woman decides (this is all without words) that the weekend is going to be spent performing Il Re Pastore (the way some hostesses might decide to perform a murder mystery or have a bridge tournament) and she starts things off by taking the part of Aminta and she recruits one of the maids to play Elisa (to the jealousy and chagrin of the other servants). Her fiance (cast as Alessandro) is less sure of the whole idea but the male guest (cast as Agenore) jumps right in. His wife doesn't seem too interested until her time to play Tamiri comes around and then she finds herself swept into the part.

 

At first I thought this "back story" would be distracting but I grew to love it. It gave the audience things to watch and think about that did not in any way distract from the story of Il Re Pastore. It helped make the "pants role" a bit less distracting than it usually is because there was no pretense that the singer was a man, it was clearly a woman singing a man's role. And it layered the meaning of the text so that the audience had multiple things to think about in this story of the tension between love and duty.

 

The set was glorious - if the house existed in real life I'd like to live in it. The costumes were magnificent, especially the gown "Aminta" wears in the second half. The orchestra was precise and not overpowering; the lighting, especially through the stained glass windows, evoked a fading day perfectly. All in all it was a perfect night.

 

Here is the Trailer for it. Watch it just to see the set and the costumes. There is also a short documentary at that site that tells more about the production itself.

Goodbye Michael Jackson

It's easy to forget how good he was.  And how big he was.  He owned the stage.  

I saw him live about three years before this tour: