SPOLETO OPERA
posted by James Reel
A week and a half ago, I dropped in on the Spoleto Festival USA, in conjunction with a meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America. I saw two of the festival’s opera productions, which on musical grounds were mostly solid, and occasionally impressive (aside from Karen Huffstodt’s faux-Brünnhilde hooting in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). But these works are more interesting to consider, I think, in terms of their success—or lack of it—as theater.
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1758 utopian comedy L’Ile de Merlin emerges from the dusty vaults with a mild inherent problem: There’s very little direct conflict to challenge the main characters. But that’s not the sort of story this is; it’s more of a Gulliver-style satire of 1750s France, in which our two heroes find themselves washed up on a strange island where philosophers are jovial, lawyers are honest and lovers are faithful—quite the opposite of the situation back home in Paris. The heroes encounter one unusual character after another, each explaining a different aspect of the island’s society. Most of the music is original, but in some cases Gluck borrowed popular songs of his day—think John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera—and gave them new lyrics that parodied the original texts. Who knew that Gluck was the Weird Al Yankovic of his time?
Today’s American audience is not likely to recognize any of those old pop songs, and the structure employed by Gluck’s librettist, while common to its genre, can seem creaky and less than involving to people who prefer plot-driven, sex-and-violence Romantic Italian opera. So Spoleto stage directors Christopher Alden and Roy Rallo decided to run the opera through with 21st-century irony. Our two heroes are modern-day slackers draped over a couch, the philosopher arrives in a happy-face costume, and so on. This is well and good, but Alden and Rallo make the fatal error of mocking not just the opera’s conventions, but its very convictions. The directors don’t trust utopias—after all, Nazi Germany was supposed to be one, at least for the “Aryans”—so there’s something sinister about the smiles permanently affixed to the faces of our heroes’ love interests, Stepford Wives in the making. Most damaging is the directors’ treatment of one scene in which an island inhabitant tries to impress his point upon the visitors by repeating it—but in a more florid, crowd-pleasing manner. That is, after all, how the da capo aria was supposed to function back in the day. But instead of indulging in the expected pyrotechnics and ornamental flights of fancy, singer Richard Troxell is directed to bellow and huff in the most disagreeable manner imaginable. And our heroes like it, for some reason. Now, if the passage had been turned into an all-out punk rock performance, we could understand why the slackers are won over. But what the directors give us is just pointlessly ugly. This is the very definition of a Eurotrash production: not necessarily one that transfers the work to an alien setting, but one that contradicts and subverts the musical and dramatic texts themslves. In the end, Alden and Rallo couldn’t even bring themselves to do that anymore; they simply ran out of ideas and let the opera sputter out on autopilot.
In contrast, Spoleto’s problem with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny had nothing to do with the stage direction of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, although I do wish they’d had a freer sense of fun. No, the trouble lies with composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht, who suffered from a Teutonic insensitivity to dramatic scale and pacing.
Mahagonny is a pleasure city founded by a trio of crooks; alas, they’ve set up so many rules that the fools they’re trying to bilk don’t have enough fun to stick around and put up with the high cost of sin. But then arrives our doomed hero, Jimmy Mahoney, who diagnoses the town’s trouble and inspires the crooks to institute a “do what you want” policy. Do what you want, as long as you pay for it. If you don’t pay, the penalty is severe, unless you bribe the judge. This is Jimmy’s downfall, but even as he is being executed, the city descends into chaos, apparently the only logical end of unchecked capitalism.
Now, Weill was not a composer to unleash a torrent of music to guide the course of a drama no matter how little textual support he had, so he had that advantage over Wagner and Strauss. Weill had the opposite problem: He tended to lock himself into a particular song form and follow its structure to the end, even if the textual variety couldn’t really justify it. (And for Mahagonny he provided mainly a procession of dirges, which makes for a very long three hours in the theater.) Weill, at least, could inject harmonic and timbral variety into just about anything, so the real fault here lies with Brecht, operating at his most didactic. For example, in the “new” Mahagonny, the men sing of the four essential pleasures of life: eating, lovemaking, fighting and drinking. Brecht then constructs an elaborate scene devoted to each of those pursuits, when a succession of little blackout routines would have gotten the point across much more effectively (and more in keeping with the quasi-vaudevillian nature of life in Mahagonny itself). In a dark social satire like this, I’d much rather be skewered than bludgeoned. (Oh, there was one nice little knife twist: Spoleto charged as much as $125 for a seat at this anti-capitalist opera.)
I can’t help thinking of something Hilton Als wrote about the American painter Winslow Homer:
Surely what we value in Homer is that he reminds us how deep and rich the effects of straightforward narrataive can be in pictures if it is made simple enough. Narrative in writing can take any amount of digression, because we read in sequence and over time, but a single stray incident in painting spoils the whole, which arrives all at once, in a moment of vision. Homer is at his best as a storyteller, and his real genius lies not in sublimation but in abbreviation: he has the gift, perhaps not so weird in the land that invented Morse code, for telling a big story in a minimum number of pulses.
