opera at your own risk

As mind-blowing, life-changing, and transfiguring as classical music is, there are a few emotions it cannot convey. The customs of the concert hall and opera house do not allow for certain opportunities which other genres of music, and other forms of art, can. One of those is danger.

Iggy Pop cuts himself on stage with glass; Marina Abramović watches someone hold a loaded gun to her head; Nam June Paik instructs the performer to creep into the vagina of a living whale.* It’s an artistic thrill that comes out of the fierce violence in punk rock and performance art of the 1970s, one which I never thought could be matched in something as uniform and urbane as opera—until Saturday night’s double-bill of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Infinite Nero at the Staatsoper.

A few minutes before show time, patrons were let into the theater’s workshop, which had been transformed into a sort of installation. Chairs were scattered around the floor, walls of TVs were set up in the corners, and at the center of the room stood a massive cardboard box. Taped to the outer walls of the box were various German newspaper clipping and diary excerpts. There were a few peepholes available, immediately creating a sense of Lost-like mystery: what’s in the box?

On multiple TVs, an actress read off descriptions of various roles she had played, gradually getting angrier. Finally seething with rage, she exploded, and Davies’ music started: mad-cap, almost cartoonish, with hooty clarinet and galloping string cross-rhythms, but also visceral. A small ensemble, sharply conducted by Arno Waschk, played from a raised area, obscured by a curtain. It was hyper-theatrical, with invisible mezzo-soprano Hanna Dóra Sturludóttir wildly embracing her demented vocals, TVs playing video of the singer juxtaposed with random footage, and that puzzling box. Davies’ 1974 theater piece is an Anglo Erwartung, a monologue tracing the madness of an Australian bride who, left at the altar, wears her wedding dress until her death thirty years later. In his staging, Michael von zur Mühlen updates the setting to the present, turning the bride into a media-obsessed, deranged stalker. Though he sacrificed some of the text to make the concept work, it made for a remarkably appropriate adaptation.

The dramatic heart lies in the middle of the work, in which an accumulation of musical effects creates a dreadful paralysis. The piano see-saws between two chords, metronomes tick and tock, creepy bells sound, and the mezzo screeches “Here comes the bride!” in a guttural roar. As we watched her video-likeness pick up a razor, there was an immediate sense of danger, unlike anything I have ever experienced in a work of theater. The room became the embodiment of her madness: the audience trapped, victim to a chamber of horrors.

In the final section, stagehands came to the center of the room and removed the walls of the mystery box. Inside, of course, was Sturludóttir, still singing, with smeared red lipstick and a blonde wig, sitting in the dingy studio apartment we had been watching in the video. In a moment of absolute disgust (and maybe the only misstep of the production), she yanked a blackened baby doll out of her loins, put it into a shopping bag, and threw it away. Picking up an electric screwdriver, she held it near her head, pondered death, and then walked into the audience.

A brief pause barely gave barely enough time to process what we had just seen. In the few minutes before Infinito Nero, I watched a second young mezzo-soprano be duct-taped to a wooden panel, splayed out in the image of Christ on the cross. That panel was then suspended from cables dangling on the far side of the room, and the opera began.

Sciarrino’s music hovers on the edge of imperceptibility, a landscape of tiny pops, slaps, and wheezes—the imitation of distant electronic sounds with acoustic means. He sets to music the ramblings of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, an Italian noblewoman who went insane and became a quasi-prophet. The vocals are infrequent but significant. Mezzo Sarah Maria Sun quickly and intensely mutters words in a kind of sing-song patter, an opaque oracle. Two well-dressed actors emerge from the audience and slowly prepare rituals of worship around the suspended mezzo: painting their bodies blue, stripping off her boots, and then painting her bare feet.

Her worshippers paint on her, “Zu fruh von uns gegangen!!!” (“Gone from us too soon,” the German equivalent of R.I.P). Things turn particularly uncanny when they whip out rubber penises, attempt to fornicate with plants, and crawl around on all fours, dragging paint all over the floor, and then don nun’s hoods. At the end, when the music reaches its most climactic point, though still hardly above a whisper, one of the men climbs a ladder in front of the mezzo and chops off his penis, dropping it to the ground.

In this staging, Sciarrino’s opera becomes a fierce indictment of organized religion: the acquisition of a prophet; the establishment of a brotherhood (first one man paints his face, then the other); the quasi-sexual squabbles between the priests; the final, violent act of celibacy. Clearly, the Catholic Church is put under scrutiny—a vision not necessarily in line with Sciarrino’s original intent, but one with which the Italian liberal might agree.

Both mezzo-sopranos sang with incredible skill, attention to detail, and range. The music, though, felt like only one aspect of a consummate theatrical work. It was one of the very, very rare events I have attended where I felt I was witnessing significant, an evening part of a larger cultural history. The dissolution of boundaries between audience and performer, common to spoken theater of the last century, heightened the experience beyond any ordinary opera staging. At the heart of this dissolution was the shock of urgency: a palpable sense that the performance witnessed was one which could only happen once, because it was too dangerous to happen again.

(all photos copyright Thomas Bartilla)

*OK, pretty sure that last one has never been performed.

The perfect program

Friday, October 9 2010

Berlin Philharmonic
Eivind Gollberg Jensen, conductor
Vadim Repin, vioin

Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium
Sibelius, Symphony No. 1

Some programs just snap together perfectly. The first and second halves make an organic whole, and the intermission functions less like a bathroom break and more like an extended pause between movements of a symphony. At the Philharmonie on Friday night, the languid opening clarinet solo of Sibelius’s First seemed to flow out of the end of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium, as if the composers met up and decided to collaborate on a concert together.

Offertorium hovers in a strange limbo between concerto and religious ritual, in which the violin plays the role of both celebrant of faith and crazed virtuoso. Recalling Webern’s famous 1935 orchestration, Gubaidulina builds the work around the main theme of Bach’s The Musical Offering.

The piece opens with that tune, passing through the brass in a one-note-per-instrument fragmentation before being picked up by the ruminative violin. Circling around Bach, the soloist obsesses over gestures, dwelling manically on certain notes. Its ghostly reflection infects the rest of the orchestra, as solo viola and later cello imitate the violin. Space-age harmonies and hair-raising harmonics fill the gaps between the violin’s meditation, with an eerily repeating pattern of celeste and glockenspiel which recalls Russian Orthodox church bells.

Towards the conclusion of the work, a glowing chorale emerges, harmonized by low strings. It is a breathtaking moment in a work of haunting complexity, one which affirms Gubaidulina’s religious fervor and does justice to her updating of Bach. Vadim Repin provided a stunning solo line, combining a frenzied attentiveness to detail with a deep sense of crafting an overall narrative through the concerto’s thirty minutes. Jensen, making his Philharmonic debut, tackled the difficult conducting role with ease, drawing upon the orchestra’s rich sounds and creating a tapestry of colors.

Such a stirring performance before intermission, though, did overshadow Sibelius by a bit.

Written in 1898, Sibelius’s First already demonstrates the composer’s unique symphonic vision. In the same decade in which Mahler composed his Teutonic early symphonies, Sibelius began working on a smaller, more refined artistic conception. The progressive narrative standard in the Germanic canon after Beethoven—the development from conflict to victory, from misery to ecstasy, or from misery back to misery again—is circumvented by Sibelius. His symphonies conjure more abstract images, eluding any descriptive story. At times, it is difficult to tell whether the music is exultant or melancholic: shadows flicker in any moment of daylight, and light gleams in every shade.

Jensen mostly captured the Nordic lilt of the music in his conducting. He gave an appropriately weird twitch to the main theme of the first movement, a disproportionately long phrase followed by a quick snap, a stamp of Sibelius’s style which you would never hear in Brahms or Mahler. But he fell short when it came to the truly thrilling moments in the symphony, the really odd accumulations of orchestral effects.

Halfway through the slow movement, an elegantly flowing andante, darkness descends upon the orchestra. Brooding brass and searching strings set a stern pace, harps weave in and out, and ethereal flutes play a string of strange trills, an icy wind blowing through the musical landscape. In the hands of Osmo Vänska or Colin Davis, it is a spectral buzz, one of the most chilling moments in the repertoire. On Friday, the moment lacked its otherworldly eccentricity; Jensen is not yet a master of Sibelius, but it will come. He was at his best in the more conventional parts of the symphony, the hot-blooded flares of Romanticism, and ably steered the portentous finale towards its half-triumphant, half-menacing end.

Edit: apologies for weird formatting, it refuses to change. Just like classical music!

constructive criticism

So on Wednesday night, I attended a performance of Jens Joneleit´s new opera Metanoia at the Berlin Staatsoper. I wrote a fairly negative critique of the piece, which I posted on Friday. Saturday morning, I received an email from none other than Jens Joneleit. After corresponding with the composer, I asked his permission to post his email (unedited) as well as my response on my blog. Here are the results.
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Dear William,

with interest I noticed your blog on my opera metanoia - thanks for your candor! Yours and the many more opinions written in most of the reviews in most German papers display to me, that there is a real necessity for this work! It amazes me, how much this piece stirs up the crowd - that one I did not expect! My intent of this opera was to create ubiquity - meaning a dissolution of a current understanding. The opera, in terms of the symbiosis of text, music and space, asks the audience to re-think their own categories of judgement and appreciation! The opera does not strive to make sense via a discursive language but a language that is still to be found. A language, or better put: a form of appreciation that lies beyond rational understanding, but allowing to appreciate things that are strange and contradictory at first! It is not mandatory to continue one's search to probe deeper! One is free to just put all of it off, saying, oh well, not a "great score", heck! The opera implies to dig deeper. Those that just pick out certain details of this work, juggling them around and comparing them with their pre-existing knowledge of things, will of course end up in a dead end! The question, for example, whether this is a "great score" is beside the point. As you probably are aware, the lack of something, or something else, is a deliberate choice. For example, that we have the kind if Berg-ian sonic field but not the "expressionism" of Berg, so the lack of, is deliberate omitting, not incapacity! The Opera is not about HOW the music sounds. It is about what the music DOES when it sounds this or that way. Or in other words: the contradictions that are present are deliberate, to provoke current thought, current categories of appreciation, nothing else new and contemporary opera can opera be! In looking back, that is what most operas achieved, when the were played for the first time - for example Salome by Richard Strauss, or your own favorite: Wozzeck by Alban Berg created the same vehement negative stir, which is now created by my opera! But that is what opera has to be about: at least here in Europe: stirring up current belief-systems, generating an appreciation going beyond what we know, probing deeper into what we do not know! And guess what, even Mozart's Operas had that very notion way back when these pieces first came out - we, after more than 200 years are just so familiar with that kind of music, that we are incapable of seeing and understanding how for example Don Giovanni pissed people off! But heck, because it did, it had the strength to survive all the way into our time.

I am not saying, that within 200 years, Metanoia will be as popular as Don Giovanni - that is the least of my ambitions. But I know, that my opera will have an impact on contributing to a different ear to listening to things. This opera is about the absurdity of current life: the more we know: scientifically, socially, politically; and the more mediums we have to exchange knowledge - should move us in a forward motion, but in actuality, life, or let us say: growth, today as never been ever before is at a complete standstill! The absurdity of contemporary life, on the lowest common denominator: 2 plus 2 no longer equals 4; that is what this opera is about in terms of tha narrative. Following the vehement reactions towards my opera, shows me, that this work hits the nerve dead center! My ambition though is, that exactly were people are set-off or perhaps put-off, where the people probe deeper. That is what opera should do, and in opera and theatre, we at least have a medium, in which we as the people, still have a refuge to allow ourselves to truly dig deeper. Going beyond what we know, allowing to see ourselves in a different perspective! That is what a great artist like Daniel Barenboim expected from me, not just to write "nice and complex" sounding music, but a music that goes beyond just sounding, striving to stir our minds. And that is what "true" contemporary music is all about: it is not about just sounding "new", it is about functioning "new" and "different". Composing is not just adding one new spectra to another. And it is especially today and tomorrow not just about creating a "great score" - that wheel has been re-invented to death. That is not the issue anymore. The issue in contemporary music is about form. It is about more, what to leave out, than about what to put in.

Maestro Barenboim really likes this opera, because it resonates beyond its sonic and musical reverberations! And that is what opera is all about. He wishes, that people would see the WHOLE, like in a game of chess: seeing the whole board! And then probe deeper, seeing things in totality!

Thanks for having plunged into my opera and written your blog!
Enjoy Berlin,
Cheers,
Jens
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My response:
Dear Jens,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful email. It must not be the easiest thing for a composer to respond to a fairly scathing review, and I definitely admire your courage in that regard. I should say first that I am relatively new to the critical business, having only been blogging for about 10 months now, and not any kind of critical authority. Luckily, as a blogger, I am my own editor, so my critical narrative is entirely my own. That said, I do believe that critics have a right to judge a work in its own time, on its own merits, even only on a single hearing.

I don´t believe that opera has to be anything. Opera can be many things, and in its 400 years of existence it has---petty entertainment for the wealthy, spellbinding religious ritual, light comedy, provocative theater. Certainly the reception of Don Giovanni, Wozzeck, and Salome point to the idea that opera should be about provocation, inciting the audience in order to get them to re-evaluate their culture and belief systems. But it can be just as successful in any of its other iterations. Opera can be Nixon in China, which sits nicely between provocation and tradition, and it can also be Zimmermann´s Die Soldaten, which at times sickens the mind in order to make its points.

I am a musicologist, which certainly changes my role as a critic. I take the long view on a contantly changing form like opera---I understand why a composer would think that opera must be provocative, but also acknowledge that there is more than one way to do things.

For me personally, opera has to give a fully engaging evening of entertainment. When I say entertainment I do not mean to imply that it should be light, or merry, or not thought provoking or abrasive. But it needs to engage all of the senses, to provide an evening rapt with emotion--whether that emotion is happiness, religious ectasy, anger, or sheer disgust. I wasn´t particularly disgusted or upset by the content of Metanoia--I was just not completely engaged.

There is an argument which you make, one which is popular in the art world as well---that because Salome and Wozzek provoked the ire of critics in their times, it must be a good sign that modern music does the same. This can be true, but is not necessarily a law to go by. Nicolas Slominsky published a fantastic book, Lexicon of Musical Invective, which scrupulously details all of the bad reviews famous composers and famous pieces have received. When confronted with such a text, it´s easy to justify the idea that great music cannot be properly evaluated in its own time. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it´s not. But I´m not sure if we should cling to the idea that music must travel to the future before receiving its proper due.

When I say that I wished for a better score, I don´t mean that the music should be separated from the complete dramatic work. I didn´t intend to imply that it should only have to provide accompaniment to the action on stage. Opera is a medium primarily based on music, and the music provides the scaffolding for the theater. I believe you were trying to create a complete work of theater (or deconstruct a complete work of theater), and a great score is vital to this. And for me, how the music sounds is equal to what the music does. It wasn´t that I was off-put by how it sounded, but that it didn´t heighten the narrative.

And I think it´s important that you know that my role as a blogger is to create a critical narrative. If I were writing for a newspaper and not just for fun, I would have prepared more---gotten to know your music, read up on the background of the opera, etc. In a work of this ambition, it is probably a good idea to come prepared. But I also believe that every audience member has the right to an educated, open-minded opinion, and that in writing my review I was reflecting upon the work standing on its own, in a single performance. As a blogger, I usually see my place as supplementing professional critics at the New York Times or Chicago Tribune, providing a second opinion. Perhaps now that I am in Berlin I need to re-evaluate my critical role; if mine is the only English-language review of your opera, then I owe it to any readers to provide more background and objective information, rather than just commentary.

I admire greatly that you, Daniel Barenboim, and the artistic team had the guts to bring something so clearly experimental to a large opera company--and as the opening night work, no less. Something like this would never happen in America, and I am glad that you and your peers are granted opportunities like this.

Again, thank you for responding. As a relatively inexperienced critic, I don´t mean to attack you personally, but only wish to provide my opinions on what little of your work I´ve heard. I hope to attend the Staatskapelle performance of your music to get a better sense of it. Would you mind if I posted this correspondence (your words unedited, of coure) on my blog? A composer has the right to respond to critics, and I think it would be interesting for people to read.

Best,
Will
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Hopefully that will be to interest to some of you. As I said, I believe that a composer has the right to respond to his critics, and in today´s world it´s possible for that response to be very direct. I hope to attend a performance of one of Joneleit´s pieces with the Staatskapelle on October 25, and get a better idea of what his music sounds like (and does).

And you should all buy the Lexicon of Musical Invective.

thinking about thinking

Wednesday, October 6 2010

Jens Joneleit, Metanoia - über das Denken hinaus
Staatsoper Berlin
Daniel Barenboim, conductor
Rest of cast/artistic team here

Every time a crazy new Regietheater production arrives in the States, somebody inevitably poses the age-old question: “If they wanted La Traviata to show prostitutes fighting werewolves in space, why didn’t they just write an opera about that?” That is, if the concept seems to have nothing to do with the opera, then why not just create a new opera that matches the concept?

Be careful what you wish for. Jens Joneleit’s Metanoia - über das Denken hinaus is a problematic solution to that dilemma, the ultimate work of Regie: it is an opera about concepts themselves. It takes a slew of intellectual, cultural, artistic, and philosophical theories and stews them together into seventy minutes of dreadful musical theater.

Joneleit, a youngish German composer, is virtually unknown in America, and I went to the Staatsoper on Wednesday night with no particular expectations. Metanoia was initially overseen by the late director Christoph Schlingensief; when he passed away in August, a team of collaborators, organized without a leader, stepped in to pick up where Schlingensief left off.

There is a kind of purposeful uncertainty to the artistic climate of the work—a program insert noted, “We don’t know exactly what has come into being, but we wish and hope that something of him [Schlingensief] lives in this production.” The artistic team chooses to leave scenic aspects of the opera deliberately half-complete, with unfinished wooden scaffolding filling the stage and Schlingensief’s ambiguous film projections running in the background independent of the action. It is a bold move, and one that had the potential to be a theatrical coup—the incomplete can take on a certain grandeur, as in the trailing off in the final contrapunctus of the Art of Fugue. But aside from a handful of engaging dramatic moments, the opera fell flat.

The libretto, freely drawn from a text by René Pollesch, which itself is freely drawn from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, gradually deconstructs itself as the opera progresses. It opens with a chorus clad in androgynous, full-body naked suits, vaguely resembling Teletubbies in the tinted yellow light. Five principal singers move in and out of the chorus, less playing characters than embodying ideas—infection, evolution, Dionysus, Apollo. They debate and ruminate on their various contradictory platitudes—“We must die so that we must live,” “Memory is forgetting”—in thick, elastic vocal lines reminiscent of Berg, but without the Expressionism of Wozzeck or the lyricism of Lulu. The diatribes are in the tradition of the philosophical meditations of the Captain and the Doctor in Wozzeck, who view the presence of the title character as an opportunity to espouse their manic ideas.

These deep musings might have succeeded theatrically if Joneleit’s music weren’t so forgettable. It began solidly, with a brief, crackling orchestral prelude which launched directly into the stern opening chorus. Though constantly moving, with jittery strings and furious brass, the music lacked momentum. Rarely did the orchestra command any narrative presence (albeit with persuasive conducting from Daniel Barenboim), and, despite being sung well, the vocal parts were not particularly stirring.

One moment stuck out and offered a bit of promise which the rest of the opera did not fulfill. About halfway through the madness, the main soprano walked out into the audience singing her abstract text achingly, while the chorus chanted those famous words of the Ode to Joy, “Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?” There was something completely bizarre about hearing Schiller’s poem in an atonal, non-Beethoven context, a defamiliarization which struck at the core of Joneleit’s concept.

I wish I could have come out of the opera with a sense that the artistic team’s intentions were realized. Metanoia isn’t really a meditation on something; it’s a meditation on meditation. As a novel, a treatise, or even a play, such a concept might work. But opera, in one of its many contradictions, requires both less and more. I could have done without the philosophical trappings if there was a good score. And if there was a good score, I probably would have demanded much more out of the libretto and production. Instead, I was left with the sinking feeling that another opportunity for a great new opera was wasted.