The Met’s new production of Lulu reminded me of something that might seem only a detail of the opera’s overstuffed plot: Dr. Ludwig Schön owns and edits a newspaper.
In the fin-de-siècle, newspapers were the ultimate and ubiquitous marker of bourgeois respectability. They shaped their readers’ daily experience of the world. We see this in Lulu: Lulu’s dance career is made by Schön’s paper, and news frequently arrives via newsprint. The Acrobat insults Schön’s paper as a “Käseblatt” (literally “cheese paper,” meaning poor boulevard press) but I imagine it must be a middlebrow broadsheet, part of Schön’s own facade of propriety. These are the papers that critics like Karl Kraus—whose scowl looms over this production at one point—condemned as pernicious and hypocritical, an instrument of the powerful which concealed more than they reveal.
The Met narrowly dodged a labor dispute to open their season last week with Richard Eyre’s new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. While the irony is inescapable, this production wouldn’t spark a revolution even if it were July 13, 1789. Its heavy, serious visuals belie an upbeat, action-packed, superficial staging with no discernible focus and no evident relationship to the music, and the mostly undistinguished musical performance isn’t enough to redeem it.
Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro. Metropolitan Opera, 9/27/2014. New production directed by Richard Eyre, sets and costumes by Rob Howell, lights by Paule Constable, choreography by Sara Erde. With Ildar Abrazakov (Figaro), Marlis Petersen (Susanna), Peter Mattei (Count), Amanda Majeski (Countess), Isabel Leonard (Cherubino), Susanne Mentzer (Marcellina), Robert Pomakov (Bartolo), Ying Fang (Barbarina)
The setting is updated to 1930s Spain. Rob Howell’s exotically tinged set is a cluster of cylinders, some of which sit on a turntable (the effect is something like a castle built of paper towel tubes with holes in their sides). (Unfortunately you can’t see it very well in any of the pictures I’ve found–the Met rarely distributes full-stage photos.) The cylinders are a very dark, decoratively carved wood which I believe is intended to represent Moroccan design. It’s a World Market, “unique” alternative to the old production’s Restoration Hardware neutrals. The lights work overtime to make it improbably illuminated, but the effect is still dark and hulking, exacerbated by the dull palette of the costumes. The turntable makes the transition between scenes quite smooth.
“Non più andrai”
But, as Intermezzo said about some other rotating stage, “the only thing that is revolutionary about it is that it turns around.” The design never establishes any connection with the story, and the whole updating seems completely superficial. Why are we in the 1930s, why are we in quasi Morocco, and what does this have to do with anything? One could put the cast in eighteenth-century costumes and the effect of the blocking and characterization would be exactly the same. (Does Team Marcellina start bopping up and down near the end of the Act II finale where they sing “che bel colpo, che bel caso”? Yes, of course they do.) When I was discussing this production with my colleague Lucy, she noted that the sets are strangely bereft of media–newspapers, magazines, books, anything–and indeed, this house doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything happening in the greater world of the 1930s. And for me, absent any plausible dramatic connection, something about the production’s visual world seems profoundly tone deaf to the score it inhabits. Mozart’s language is one of structural clarity, harmonic transparency, and linear development, and the set’s dense surfaces and circular figures don’t work against the score in a productive way, they’re just wrong. It strikes me as a set for a Baroque opera, not Mozart. (I thought of Karol Berger’s study Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow here.)
Like the set, the staging favors the accumulation of detail over narrative precision. There is always something to see, but the “business of the house”–servants bustling around doing their jobs–does notcontribute to the whole. Also, Cherubino’s hormones have infected the whole cast with a lust so urgent that Susanna’s pickiness really does seem anomalous. (This sort of “roll in zee hay”-type Figaro was also evident in the last revival of the old production.) This is present from this new production’s opening gesture, in which a naked lady rushes downstage and quickly covers herself up. It doesn’t seem to matter who she is or where she’s coming from–though she appears ashamed–just that there she is, shirtless. Eyre’s production is suffused with casual eroticism (the type that is marketed as “look! opera is sexy!” to a skeptical public), but an unbuttoned quality leaves little space to stage the hierarchical relationships which drive the plot, from Figaro’s relationship with Marcellina to Barbarina and beyond. When Figaro becomes a sex comedy, it loses all its edge. After all, the Count and Susanna’s would-be relationship is obviously not about sex but about power.
“Voi che sapete”
In short, the production is the rush job that we know it was. In the Times, Eyre described himself as choosing from the “opera supermarket” of the cast’s previous experiences, and that recycled, collage approach is very evident. Eyre is competent, and it’s never unwatchable or even as dull as Michael Grandage’s Don Giovanni. But the production packs no punch at all, never aspiring to gravity or significance beyond the farce, and that’s profoundly disheartening. A new production is not only a time to replace aging costumes but also to rethink a work’s meaning, to present a sharp and focused point of view, and the latter half of that equation does not seem to have occurred to anyone. (It wasn’t evident in Eyre’s Wertherlast season either.)
A stellar cast and musical performance could have made this disappointment less acute, but it was pretty middle of the road. James Levine’s conducting was worryingly erratic, sometimes picking beautiful textures from the orchestra, and in the finales building quite nicely, but more often losing all momentum altogether. In all, this was a very slow performance. The tempos seemed to stress out some of the singers, and certainly sapped the dramatic energy. The very enthusiastic continuist attempted to make up for this single (well, double) handedly with torrents of notes in the recit, but that wasn’t the best effect either. (Would it kill the Met to use a fortepiano sometime?)
Count and Susanna, I mean, Countess
While the cast didn’t seem to have many united goals, there were some standouts. The best was Peter Mattei’s Count, a known quantity to me. This was the same interpretation I saw him do in the old production–on a power trip, and dangerous–which isn’t the point of a new production, but it works. His voice is as velvety as ever and his “Contessa perdono” is the most beautiful in the business. Marlis Petersen’s Susanna was also successful. Vocally, she’s a somewhat odd casting choice; she’s spent most of her career in the stratospheric range of Lulu and this sounds like it may be uncomfortably low for her. Sometimes the tone became a bit unfocused and spread. But she is refined and elegant, and a good actress.
Countess
Amanda Majeski’s Countess (her debut) tended to stay in the shadows, showing little of the passionate characterization so evident in her Philadelphia Donna Elvira earlier this year. But her singing is interesting and promising: an unusually distinctive sound, cool and reedy with a slightly fluttery vibrato (she reminds me a little of Anne Schwanewilms), very nice up to a slightly underwhelming top. Her “Dove sono” was successfully meditative, but the phrases lacked the last bit of direction–probably because of Levine’s funereal tempo.
Two of the singers had obvious appeal to the audience but I found them puzzling. Ildar Abdrazakov’s Figaro was likeable enough but one-dimensional and generalized. His singing is perfectly reliable and clean (he even sneaked in some ornaments near the end of “Se vuol ballare,” the only cast member who managed as much as a passing tone), but he’s not very complex or magnetic. And I just didn’t get Isabel Leonard’s Cherubino. She was the victim of several of Levine’s stranger conducting decisions, and she stayed with him, but her dry and biting tone is unattractive and her acting was irritatingly over the top, more mugging than portrayal. In the smaller roles, Ying Fang was a smashing Barbarina who sounds like she’s ready for bigger things, Susanne Mentzer was unusually tasteful as Marcellina, and substitute Robert Pomokov was perfectly fine as Bartolo.
This wouldn’t be bad for a third revival, but for opening night it’s unfortunate.
My Beaumarchais beat goes on tomorrow night at Opera Philadelphia’s Barber of Seville. (I last blogged about Figaro and Barber too, oddly enough. Oh well, can’t really beat ’em.)
Peter Konwitschny’s new Traviata at the Oper Graz looks like simplicity itself. The set consists solely of some curtains and a single (1) chair. Most university productions are more elaborate. But this performance, led by Marlis Petersen’s devastating Violetta, needed no help to cut right to the heart, and the story unfolds with a brutal directness. The score is trimmed in ways you might expect and some you wouldn’t (no intermission), and the musical performance is so closely tied to the drama that discussing it separately seems silly.
It is, in short, this is Musiktheater with a capital M (because it’s a German noun, duh).
Verdi, La Traviata. Oper Graz, 3.6.2011. Production by Peter Konwitschny, sets and costumes by Johannes Leiacker, lights by Joachim Klein. Conducted by Tecwyn Evans with Marlis Petersen (Violetta), Giuseppe Varano (Alfredo), James Rutherford (Germont)
The spare means of the production belie its conceptual sophistication. The rows of curtains are printed with trompe de l’oeil folds, and their red ripples are echoed in Violetta’s Act 1 dress. (Yes! we have another objectified lady in a short red dress o’ oppression.) They represent the layers of Violetta’s life: the shallowest stage (the most downstage curtains drawn) is her life as a courtesan, her love for Alfredo lets her painfully begin to open the layers to her deeper self. Finally, in the denouement at Flora’s in Act 2, it all collapses, the curtains pulled down, leaving the empty space of Violetta’s destroyed world.
She is already deathly ill in Act 1; the black-clad guests at her party are voyeurs, watching her every gasp. The group is less a dazzling society than a drunken, sadistic mess. Eager for more entertainment, the crowd throws nerdy, out-of-place Alfredo at Violetta, laughing at his attempt at a toast. She rebuffs him, but he tellingly makes his appearance in “Sempre libera” from the audience: the world of Alfredo and his father is the bourgeois one of the opera’s audience.
In Act 2, Violetta has desexualized herself, losing her bob wig and dress in favor of a lumberjack shirt, cargo pants, and combat boots, but this domestic and pastoral life is also an uneasy illusion of happiness (behind the curtains drawn at the end of Act 1 is another curtain). Alfredo’s father is a violent brute, actually bringing along his very young daughter to the meeting and not treating her so well. (Konwitschny is a good Brechtian, and the bourgeois morality on display is sufficiently hypocritical.) This life, it seems, isn’t all that fulfilling either, and Violetta even seems willing to shoot herself.
The pacing of the scene at Flora’s party is very strange, because the ballet is cut, as well as the references to the duel. Alfredo shows the moralizing tendencies of his father in the previous scene, leading to the climactic breaking point found in most Konwitschny productions, or, as Konwitschy puts it in his program note, “the surface cracks for a moment, and through his music Verdi gives us an insight into the genuinely apocalyptic forces in so-called civilized society… the whore, the only genuine human being in this opera, expresses, more or less as the lead voice, the great longing for a truly fulfilled existence.”
The final scene offers Violetta little consolation. The doctor is still wearing his party hat from the night out, and even though Alfredo returns too late, and as Violetta dies the other characters move further and further away from her, not so much a physical distance as an existential one. Eventually the all appear in the audience while she, heartbreakingly, dies alone.
What keeps the production going is the detail and commitment of the performances, from the leads to the chorus. The bare setting feels exactly right for a production this emotionally intimate and vivid. Never is there a hint of sentimentality. The cuts and lack of intermission place the focus squarely on Violetta’s quickly-unfolding fate as she attempts to find a livable place in an inhuman world.
Marlis Petersen’s utterly tragic Violetta is at the very center, with honesty, intensity, commitment, and considerable acting talent. She is a coloratura soprano, and while her high notes are dazzling the middle of her voice is less than refulgent. But she is so absorbing that complaining seems ridiculous. Giuseppe Varano as Alfredo’s acting was less accomplished than Petersen’s. The basic idea was there, but some of the more frantic moments did not quite work, though he was clearly trying. He is a solid, traditional Italian lyric tenor, but his singing in the passaggio and above sometimes sounded constrained, though he managed a decent high C at the end of the cabaletta. (We got one verse of his cabaletta while Germont’s cabaletta was cut, as were the second verses of Ah, forse’è lui and the letter aria.)
James Rutherford was a deep Wagnerian Germont, an odd bit of casting. He did his best to sing with flexibility, but sometimes sounded ill at ease in the more lyrical sections such as “Pura siccomme un angelo.” The aria was better. And he was an excellent actor in this exceptionally unsympathetic conception of the role. Smaller roles were adequately sung.
Tecwyn Evans conducted a fast account of the score that fit the production’s intermission-less rush, and everything held together well. The orchestra sounded quite good, but to be honest I did not notice them a whole lot.
This is not a Traviata for everyone–I know people who would be hollering about the cut of the ballet, and other people who would disparage the lack of pretty costumes–but as a night out at the theater it is a powerful experience. Not to be missed.
Note that this production is a joint effort with the English National Opera. Watch the trailer below and then see some photos I took of the beautiful Graz opera house. Further performances 11.3, 26.3 and 5.5, 18.5, 27.5 (in May with a slightly different cast).
Trailer:
Local sights:
This model is for people with visual disabilities, but somehow it reminded me of Act 1 of Stefan Herheim’s Rosenkavalier.
Those go straight to Maestro Evans’s dressing room, thx.
Production photos copyright Werner Kmetitisch/Oper Graz
Berg, Lulu (three act version). Metropolitan Opera, 5/12/10. Conducted by Fabio Luisi with Marlis Petersen (Lulu), James Morris (Dr. Schön/Jack the Ripper), Anne Sofie von Otter (Gräfin Geschwitz), Gary Lehman (Alwa), Michael Schade (Painter/African Prince), Gwynne Howell (Schigolch), Bradley Garvin (Athlete/Animal Trainer). Production by John Dexter.
I think it is reasonable to say that most audience members, directors, and conductors would identify Lulu as an unremittingly bleak and surreal blast of sex and violence. What we got at the Met last night was considerably more complex than that, and fascinatingly so.
Marlis Petersen is completely at ease in Berg’s musical world. She not only sings all of Lulu’s ridiculously demanding music without apparent effort but moves with an amazing sensitivity to the musical gesture, and not just the gestures she is singing. I would like to think that this is the kind of performance Berg was looking for when he wrote so many picky stage directions in his score. Petersen’s Lulu feels almost like a choreographic realization of the music.
Like her cousin Salome, Lulu is usually interpreted today as a passive creation of male desire rather than as an aggressor. Taking Lulu as a helpless victim of men, as Petersen does, makes us feel a little better about the gender politics of this piece, though I doubt Berg, much less his buddies Kraus and Weininger, would recognize this take on feminine nature. This approach makes her increased awareness in the second half something of a self-actualization, which again feels better to us now. (I think Petersen’s approach is entirely the right one for today, and I would probably be very uncomfortable with anything else, but I think we need to acknowledge that this piece has a shitload of gender trouble.)
Fabio Luisi’s conducting continues to be wonderful, finding brilliantly clear textures without ever losing forward motion. Tempos were on the fast side. This, combined with more lightness than usual, brought out a surprising amount of black comedy in the score. There are parts of Lulu that have a great deal of dark humor, but they are usually awkward. I’m never sure if I should laugh when Lulu somewhat offhandedly mentions to Alwa that she was the one who poisoned his mother. But they felt right here, and successfully tied together surreal and farcical elements of the opera together–the ritualistically echoing lines, the allusions to number opera–with the more expected lustful and violent ones.
This happened dramatically as well. John Dexter’s production is dully realistic and somewhat worn around the edges–the Met photographer avoided taking many photos that show much of the sets, perhaps understandably. The sets occupy only a small triangle of space center stage. It all feels hopelessly tame and frumpy for the goings-on, and sucked some blood from the piece, so to speak, that a more brilliant backdrop might have focused more. A certain amount of depraved zing was lost, but it had an interesting effect. The stodgy setting, and the ease and fluidity of Petersen’s Lulu contrasted with the stiff and much more static performances of her men (intentional or accident of casting? I don’t know), all of which pushed us towards a Schnitzler-like satire of bourgeois life. Sometimes in the schtickier moments it even suggested a middlebrow farce or comedy of manners that happened to involve a lot of violence (“the servant who is intentionally clattering those dishes is having an affair with my wife too? damnation!”). I think the production intended to be entirely straight, but something about such a resolutely concrete and staid staging of such a louche, surreal piece of work is radical in itself. To my convoluted mind, at least.
But at the turning point of the opera–that is to say, the Film Music linking the two scenes of Act II–things got a lot darker. (No film this time, which I missed but am not going to throw a fit over.) In the plot, this is where Lulu is in prison and then in the hospital, which she identifies as “when she came to know herself,” the semi-self-actualization I mentioned above. Dexter’s set for Act 3 Scene 1 is considerably less realistic than the ones before it (limited color palette, bigger contrasts). Everything begins to replay itself in Berg’s recapitulatory and palindromic fashion, only this time despite the ever-increasing ridiculousness of the plot it is in deadly earnest (a few jokes at the expense of some bankers aside). I wish the final London scene had been a bit grittier and grimier–Jack the Ripper, as you can see above, looks halfway respectable–but it was certainly creepy enough. Lulu seems aware that she can do little to control her fate.
As for the rest of the singing, it was good! James Morris redeemed some ofhis wobbles earlier in the season with an excellently sung though occasionally dramatically blank Dr. Schön–I can understand that Dr. Schön is a bit on the repressed side, though. Gary Lehman sang Alwa with heroic strength, particularly his impassioned and tireless rendition of the Act 2 Scene 2 duet, a highlight of the score. Bradley Gauvin was a maniacally animated Athlete and Animal Trainer, the latter more sung than Sprechstimme’d. The other supporting parts, particularly Gwynne Howell’s gentle Schigolch and Graham Clark’s scary character tenors, were all excellent.
The Countess Geschwitz is the most human character in the opera, to my mind, and Anne Sofie von Otter was touching. This was my first time hearing her live despite having a few of her CDs and considering myself a big fan. Her voice is in excellent condition, and she made this sometimes pathetic character gently sympathetic, and her end truly tragic.
I’m glad that I could end my Met season with such an amazing performance. Three cheers for all involved, but particularly Maestro Luisi. (Then, for Berg, those three cheers again in retrograde!)
Lest you think this is the nadir of sex and violence in opera, I will be reporting on the New York Philharmonic’s production of Le grand macabre in exactly two weeks. Perhaps some end-of-season fun before then.
Edited to add p.s. to people led here from Google Finance: I’m guessing that you’ve decided by now that I have nothing to say about the stock LULU. You are wrong, I do have an opinion. I think those yoga pants are really overpriced.
Video: There was a video here, but it apparently poses copyright issues. Removed at the request of the Chicago Lyric Opera, sigh. Don’t want to get anyone in trouble.
Ambroise Thomas, Hamlet. Metropolitan Opera, 3/16/2010. Conducted by Louis Langrée with Simon Keenlyside (Hamlet), Marlis Petersen (Ophélie), Jennifer Larmore (Gertrude), James Morris (Claudius), Toby Spence (Läerte), David Pittsinger (Ghost). New production premiere by Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser.
In last Sunday’s Times, directors Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser defended Ambroise Thomas’s operatic Hamlet’s “dramatic integrity” and lack of sentimentality and bombast. That’s one way of looking at it. For my taste, despite some good set pieces and two compelling leading roles, the ratio of banal to memorable music is far too high, and Thomas’s dull score wears out its welcome well before the end of this (sometimes interminable) work. Caurier and Leiser’s production has some sincere and compelling acting. But visually it ranges from unmemorable to ugly, and is marred by some unnecessarily silly touches that could well be cut. While I enjoyed some of the performances a great deal and don’t exactly regret that I saw it, I feel no need to see Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet ever again.
Of course for English-speaking audiences in particular this opera stands in the long shadow of Shakespeare’s play, which we all have studied and seen many times. Comparison is kind of interesting but tells us more about ourselves than it does about this opera. For my part I really miss Shakespeare’s supporting characters: Polonius and Horatio are there but not important enough to qualify as characters, and forget about Roz and Guil. More interesting is the loss of Fortinbras, which reduces the plot to basically a family drama. Thomas’s Hamlet notoriously lives at the end, as is standard in French opera of this time. He doesn’t in this production, we’ll get to that.
Caurier and Leiser’s production is abstract, and the sets a few dingy rotating walls. Thus continues the reign of beige or beige-ish (these were pink) at the Met this year. These are some of the least compelling of their species, and to little other than give the singers something (ugly) to stand in front of. Maybe they looked better in one of the small opera houses from which this production originated? (This production has been around. It’s already on DVD.) Costumes are generic royal with occasional surreal bits. I guess the best thing about the design is that it brings the focus to the characters.
Simon Keenlyside gives a real tour de force in the leading role, and is probably the best thing about this production. Thomas gives Hamlet mostly austere music, with the exception of the notorious rollicking drinking song (if you know anything out of this opera, it’s probably this). Keenlyside does an excellent job capturing Hamlet’s shifts between ambivalence, grief, and rage, and is probably one of the best actors you’re going to see in opera today. His voice has also gotten warmer and rounder than I remember, and seems ideal for this music. He can pull off most of the production’s more audacious ideas, including an over-the-top quasi-mad scene that enlivens a dull chorus and reprise of the drinking song. But even he can’t sell Hamlet running into a wall at the end of the otherwise exciting Hamlet-Gertrude duet. (I remember this being a dumb moment in the DVD. Why hasn’t someone cut it by now?)
Marlis Petersen is new to me. I suppose this production was put on mostly for Dessay, but she is more than an adequate substitute, and in this high stuff probably far superior than Dessay these days. Her voice is slightly dark in color, unusual and interesting for a coloratura type, but clear and in tune (mostly). She doesn’t have much legato in her singing, which I didn’t mind here, but I can see why she specializes in German roles. Compared to Keenlyside, who can make a great deal of a small gesture, her performance was sometimes a bit blank, but considering that as a late substitute for Dessay she barely got a chance to rehearse at all and was probably really jet-lagged, she was impressively coordinated with everyone else. And her mad scene, given a bloody and dramatic staging involving (I think) a phantom pregnancy, was excellent and one of the highlights of the evening, the staging occasionally serving to distract from some strained high notes. The musically innovative coda, in which wordless offstage pre-Daphnis et Chloé nymphs coax Ophelia into the river, however, seemed dramatically unnecessary and only served to remind me that I missed Lost AGAIN. Also that I would rather be seeing Rusalka.
But Caurier and Leiser? When you speak admiringly of Thomas’s restraint and then stage a mad scene that involves a lot of self-mutilation and another that involves your protagonist pouring wine over his own head I begin to doubt your stated opposition to silly effects. Anyways, spicing up the boring parts is entirely justified, and desperately needed. The mixture of melodrama and sensitive lyricism is probably the most interesting thing here, even if the melodrama occasionally slides into the ridiculous and the lyric into the dull. These kinds of contrasts are, after all, the stuff 19th-century French operas are made of. (Oops, wrong Shakespeare there.)
Jennifer Larmore was best in Gertrude’s melodramatic moments, particularly her scene with Hamlet. (There is one circumstance in which I would see Hamlet again: Waltraud Meier as Gertrude. Not that that will ever happen, so I’m safe.) James Morris seriously needs to retire. He was wobbly but not horrible in Simon Boccanegra, but his singing here pained the ears. Toby Spence was a tenor, that’s about all I have to say, I could hear him but he is somewhat pale of voice. Läerte doesn’t give one much to work with, I seem to recall an aria at the beginning but can say nothing of it. David Pittsinger as the Ghost outsang Morris by a mile, they should swap roles.
As for that ending? Thomas’s Act V takes place at Ophelia’s funeral (after the gravedigger’s episode, though there is no Yorick) and does not resemble Shakespeare very much. Apparently inspired by the previous year’s premiere of Verdi’s Don Carlos, the libretto gives the ghost a reappearance. Thomas later wrote an ending in which Hamlet dies. This production uses some parts of that ending, and, SPOILER, in a very short sword fight Laertes and Hamlet manage to kill each other. I did not find it convincing, but was glad that the opera was finally over. (It is three hours 20 minutes with only one intermission. Sorry, but that is too long when you’re Ambroise Thomas.)
Some booing at the end, surprisingly for conductor Louis Langrée as well as the directors. The conducting did not strike me as anything special, but neither did it seem that bad. There were quite a few clams from the brass in Act 1, but I don’t think that was Langrée’s fault. As for the production team boos, well, that seems to be our mode of opera(tion) these days.
Next: Emmanuelle Chabrier infamously quipped, “There is good music, there is bad music, and there is the music of Ambroise Thomas.” We will consider this statement further after a performance of Chabrier’s L’Étoile at the City Opera on Thursday. (It is thoughtfully given an early curtain, so I might be able to get home in time for Project Runway!)
