Whimsy in the face of chaos as Russian history repeats itself (Books & Opera - The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, There Once Lived a Mother.... by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dmitri Shotakovch)

Today, as more than 50,000 Russians march to honor Boris Y. Nemtsov, the Putin critic who was assassinated a few days ago, it seems timely to consider some of the art made in the context of Soviet and Russian regimes, which may be different for the name they give their ruler but seem alike in their repression of opposing views.  While Putin is stripping off his shirt and getting into bed with the oligarchs, politically repressing homosexuals, and annexing Crimea as the Empress Catherine the Great did before him, I read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, written by Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian living in Paris in the late 1940s, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Live a Mother Who Loved her Children, Until They Moved Back In, three novellas about Soviet Life written between 1988 and 2002, and I saw the 1934 Shotakovich opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Metropolitan Opera.

These three works plumb life's extremities, attempting the creation of some kind of meaning in the face of the suffering endured by the artist.  So we can thank repressive regimes for that literary construct we call the Russian soul.  Each of these works express deep longing for something better. 

The failure of civilization beautifully expressed (Opera - From the House of the Dead by Leos Janacek)

Leos Janacek, the early 20th century Czech composer wrote music of a distinctive lyrical angularity. The pieces generally have an off-kilter, often hesitant rhythm, yet can be suffused with longing at some times and a sweet simplicity at others. His nine operas are no less idiosyncratic, setting unusual material such as the story of a fox serialized in drawings and stories in a local newspaper (Cunning Little Vixen), a play about an inheritance by Karel Capek that concerns a 300-year-old opera diva (The Makropulos Case), or The Excursions of Mr. Broucek, who travels in the opera's first act to the moon and in its second to 15th century Prague. His music was deeply informed by the folklore of Moravia, which he researched throughout his life. He meant his operas and songs not to force the texts to be subservient to his music but rather, he wrote his music to the rhythm and prosody of the Czech language.

I was delighted that the Metropolitan Opera finally mounted a new production by the sometimes controversial French director Patrice Chereau of Janacek's last and rarely done opera From the House of the Dead. It is based on Dostoevsky's writings about life in a Siberian prison in the 1860s. There is no story per se, it is rather an atmosphere piece in which the rituals of daily life, the resignation, and occasional flights of hope of the prisoners are chronicled. The story is not linear but the prisoners share their lives with each other through narratives and raunchy sketches for entertainment and these have a more traditional linear backbone if one needs a such a structure on which to hang ones hat, and clearly some of the mystified Met audience did. Chareau found a wonderful balance between evoking the sameness, the bleakness of vision of the place, the energy of a community whose members help keep each other alive, and the stories of the individuals who make up this community - who they loved and are loved by - each given dignity through these stories. There is the wonderful friendship that develops between Gorianchikov - a gentleman prisoner - and the youngest prisoner - Alyeya - whom Gorinchikov teaches to read. Particularly poignant is the story of Shishkov, set as a 20-minutes monologue by Janacek, and brought to vivid life in the richly played performance of Peter Mattei. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Met orchestra found an almost romantic richness to the music; the overture is a stunner. Set designer Richard Peduzzi created a concrete box with moving walls that is always a prison, but could be a prison anywhere and at any time. It has a hulking and domineering character at some moments and a tight claustrophobic one at others.


I particularly loved the opening of the second act, which transforms the space by dumping thousands of torn books on the stage - they produce a sound like a single, catastrophic explosion, dust flying everywhere and then the prisoners emerge through this cloud of dust doing their punitive work. I found this image multi-layered and evocative of, on the one hand, the futility of their work, and on another the laying to waste of words, of ideas, and of law. The futility was expressed in the instantaneousness of the mess. A mess simply made so that they might clean it up. And, if they ever get through the mountain of trash, a new load would simply be dumped there so that they may start over again. The mess was one of books, of text, as if to express the laying to waste of individual narrative, of the record of humanity, of ideas, and also of the law. Prisons express the ultimate failure of civilization, whether the culture is democratic or totalitarian, and whether the crimes committed are genuine psychopathic outrages or crimes of the expression of ideas that should not be crimes at all. We can scream all we want about the indecency of someone's crime, political disagreement, or fatal mistake but, when we take away someone's humanity we lessen our own. We may convince ourselves that it is less heinous when we feel sure of the seriousness of the crime and I am not beneath feeling jail is the proper place for people who have done certain things, but I do not pretend that this is civil or loving impulse or that it solves the problem of crime. This production documents the life of unjust imprisonment anywhere and in any age and simultaneously celebrates the humanity of those individuals lost inside. It also gives an important and little-produced 20th century piece of music-theatre a deserved and sensitive production that is beautiful to look at and listen to. I hope the Met brings it back in future seasons.

Hiking, opera, tea, theatre, book shopping, friends, and home again...

This is the B&B we stayed at in the Cotswolds and its garden. Some rain gave us lots of time for reading, but we also took several hikes on the wonderful network of pubic footpaths that cut through fields and woods across the U.K. Unlike the U.S., where keeping other people off one's land seems a priority, in England, although the farm belongs to the farmer, its beauty is shared with walkers. One can walk for hours uninterrupted and mostly skirt main roads, enjoying a quiet walk in a natural setting. It appears that hikers are respectful, we did not see a single piece of trash along the way. After one of our hikes we had a great afternoon tea in Chipping Camden. I love meeting artists and visiting their studios and try to do this wherever we visit. Our hosts introduced us to a local artist whose work we we found interesting and we had some coffee with her and checked out her work. Our long hike from Chipping Norton took us to an ancient stone circle known as the Rollright Stones. Chipping Norton also boasts a very nice independent bookshop and Cafe - Jaffe and Neale. As you can soon read in a future post, I was pretty wowed by Molly Fox's Birthday and was able to find a copy of her earlier novel One by One in the Darkness there.



We also attended the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in Sussex, seeing our friends there, 2 completed productions, and 1 in rehearsal. Giulio Cesare, a revival, has justifiably been a great sensation. I had seen it on DVD but it's much more fun live. Our friend, Danielle de Niese, sings, dances and acts Cleopatra (pictured below left) in a performance of gob-smacking energy and beauty. Falstaff is a wonderfully conceived production by Richard Jones set in World War II England. Christopher Purves blends great singing and detailed acting into one unified whole is the title role and Marie-Nicole Lemieux is fantastic as Mistress Quickly. The Fairy Queen, which we saw in rehearsal, looks like it is going to be great fun as well. It features The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the always strong direction of William Christie and I thought the choreography by Kim Brandstrup particularly strong.





We stayed in the big house at Glyndebourne (pictured above left) which was a lot of fun. Sussex was also the stomping grounds of some of my favorite Bloomsburyites. We visited Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's house - Charleston (above right) - and it is well worth a visit. Having worked on a play about Virginia Woolf and her circle for years, finally standing in those rooms next to the wall paintings, their studios, and garden was amazing. Unfortunately, we did not get to see Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Monk's House. Maybe next time.

We also visited Oxford, just strolling around for a few hours. The Blackwell Bookstore there is amazing. Having enjoyed William Fiennes The Music Room so much, I found his The Snow Geese there and picked up a copy. Finally, we spent several days in London. We found the Wellcome Collection's exhibits about mental health and art very interesting and they have a great bookstore as well! We also saw Sir John Soane's Museum, which we missed on our last several visits. His collection includes the Hogarth A Rake's Progress and many antiquities. It's quite a house to spend a few hours in (and it's free). We also attended two productions, both at the National Theatre, J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways - certainly a play before its time in terms of cinematic use of time. The productions is, sadly, an unimaginative bore - lazily substituting screaming and cliches for acting, actors working from the neck up only. The production would have required some sort of physical language to reveal the special qualities of this play. Sadly, they never didn't come up with one in the first two acts and I wasn't waiting around for the third. The second play we saw was a very hot ticket - Hellen Mirren is playing the title role in Phedre in a strong and accessible translation by Ted Hughes. The production also features Margaret Tyzack and Dominic Cooper. There were some nice moments here and there. I thought John Shrapnel as Theramene turned in the strongest work of the evening. Dominic Cooper's peformance was pretty intelligent and centered and Stanley Townsend had a couple of moments where he was filled with the pain of Theseus's circumstances, but sadly those did not a Phedre make. I found most of the actors substituted vocal technique for real connection with these extreme circumstances. Mirren told us she was moved, horrified, devastated, but rarely succeeded in actually showing us that that was so. When she did her connection seemed banal, theatrical, rarely human. We attended the production with my cousin and his fiancee and heading off to the restaurant, he said to me that he couldn't understand why anyone would want to mount Greek tragedy (via French neo-classicism) as it had no meaning today. This seems to me the one reason for mounting any play - that it has some meaning in the context of our own lives. This production has a clear financial motivation for its mounting and one that would fascinate fans but it did not ably communicate to me any esthetic one. We didn't luck out with our theatre-going in London this time but our visits with friends and family and walking around the beautiful city were pleausures enough.

Cultural riches, cultural poverty...

Philip Kennicott writes an excellent review in The Chronicle of Higher Education of two books about the life of the much admired and much maligned late founder and director of the Opera Company of Boston - Sarah Caldwell. The reach of Caldwell's work and the extremes of her personality would need at least two books. Kennicott quotes Daniel Kessler's The First Woman of Opera:

Is that why she grew so obese? It seems a ridiculous question, the sort that would never be asked of a male conductor...Caldwell's physical size very quickly became a kind of shorthand for her reputation. In her best years, during the 1960s and 70s, the artist with a charming indifference to her physical self was seen as a maverick and an eccentric. But when everything started to fall apart, the overweight impresario was seen as out of control and undisciplined.

The truth was, she was all of those, and as long as she could scrape together the money, the maverick could do her astonishing work. But when the money ran out, memories of the maverick were almost instantly effaced. Her cultural exchange with the Soviet Union was a critical triumph, but she never bothered to cover the bills. Personal pressure from no less than Secretary of State George P. Shultz was required to keep the thing from becoming a fiasco.

Indeed, her unkempt appearrance would have been given less emphasis if she had been a man, but opera has a pretty glitzy veneer. The first class of every year of teaching opera singers acting, I would have at least one student show up to class in a suit or evening gown until I posted notices that sweat pants were preferred. Anyhoo, what I like about this review is how it recognizes the contradictions that were embodied in this single person (as is true of most of us) and sees these two books as a more honest portrait than either one of them alone. I really enjoyed this one excerpt Kennicott quotes from Caldwell's own memoir Challenges: A Memoir of my Life in Opera, not so much for the discussion as to the degree of Caldwell's self knowledge but because it places in context the job she took on as an artistic director in the United States:

The closest that Caldwell comes to acknowledging her deeper flaws in Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera is an observation she borrows from one of this country's most influential leaders in the arts: "McNeil Lowry, head of the Ford Foundation, once said that when he went into a room he could always spot the arts directors because they all appeared to be somewhat wounded," she writes. "They were too thin or too fat; they smoked too much, or were nervous, because their fund-raising responsibilities weighed so heavily on them."

Having both run and assisted the running of several small theatre companies in the U.S., and knowing many others who have and do run them, I got a big chuckle out of that. And as I write this with the radio giving reports of hysteria over that abstraction called "the economy," and wealthy industries desperate for bailouts, my thoughts turned to a different kind of poverty we experience here by virtue of how little emphasis is placed on culture, on experiences of beauty and richness in the course of educating our children and living our daily lives as adults. How much better the world can be for those who would sacrifice everything - their possessions, their health, their physical attractiveness - just to make something that looks or sounds exceptional, and how mistrustful and disrespectful we can be of that impulse. It may not seem on the same order as the drop in the Dow but that is a kind of poverty too.

Hat tip: Books, Inq.

Disturbing the universe (Opera - Dr. Atomic by John Adams & Peter Sellars)

American composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars have created an unlikely hybrid in Doctor Atomic - an abstract documentary opera on the creation of the atomic bomb. A documentary because it is based on actual occurrences and people. Abstract because while it focuses on the days approaching the testing of the bomb at Los Alamos, it is less a linear story than a collage. It uses projection and sculpture, going back and forth from the daily activities at Los Alamos to the interior monologues of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading physicist on the project, and his wife Kitty, and includes two poems - one a sonnet of John Donne's and the other Muriel Rukeyser's Easter Eve 1945. These varied components hang together on a score strongly consistent in temperament and sonority. Opening each of the two acts act is a recorded soundscape evoking the period and atmosphere of those days - bits of radio, sounds of machinery, jeeps driving around the dessert, the thunder storms that plagued the testing schedule. But this gives way to Adams orchestral music, which is brash, solid, evocative and intense. Modern textures mix with beautiful lyrical lines. You know what century you are in and you can feel the disturbance in the universe that is the theme of this work.

The Manhattan Project led to the development of a bomb that worked via the fission of the uranium atom, splitting it into small parts to cause the release of tremendous amounts of energy. Some also call it the birth of “Big Science.” The destructive force of the bomb was meant to be unparalleled, but once unleashed it would literally mean that humans could destroy everything. J. Robert Oppenheim, may have been a leader of the project, but he was also a voice of conscience. Quoting the Bhavagad Gita he wrote “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Once accomplished, this disturbance in the physical structure of the universe would leave the world a less stable place. While our increased knowledge would facilitate victory in war, it precipitated a world with political and humane problems never before contemplated. Dr. Atomic is a meditation on disturbance at these multiple levels and is beautiful in its sensitive expression of conscience and appropriately unsettling.

The production, directed intelligently by Penny Woolcock, is strong on story-telling. She is master for using people and things on stage to make our progress from event to event clear. There is none of the Met's typical sloppiness and nineteenth century stage clichés of people getting up on boxes to sing solo lines. Stage action was human and necessary. However Ms. Woolcock was less adept in her ability to develop the vertical line of the piece - the point in soliloquoy or aria when time’s literal progress stops and the inner workings of a person’s mind or soul unfolds before us. Here is where theatre engages in a little “quantum physics” of its own, defeating the typical laws and time and space, travelling in a way that memory and imagination allows. In these equally important moments of Dr. Atomic Ms. Woolcock seemed to have left the performers to their own devices. They became unrooted, and frozen in general attitude. It was a shame because the score and libretto in Kitty's Oppenheimer's scene in Act II were crazily inventive and an opportunity for complex internal conflict expressed with challenging music. An Act I scene meant to develop the Oppenheimers relationship, and the only time we see them together, was strangely disconnected and made unimaginative use of a silly choreographed dance rather than having these troubled human creatures connect to their love, or their pain in its absence, their feelings of inadequacy, or their feelings about anything at all. A more thoughtful development of the character of Pasqualita - the Oppenheimers’ housekeeper - might have helped sustain our interest in her long aria that opened Act II. The production seemed to want to use her as a spiritual symbol of the indiginous culture of New Mexico and perhaps stand for the parts of Los Alamos history that were more respectful of nature, but between desultory staging and textual references to vishnu and the trinity, I couldn't figure out what was intended.

Otherwise the production was strongly satisfying. Its physical elements were creative, functional, and a pleasure to look at. The Met chorus was used as an effective narrator and their performance was uncharacteristically precise and energetic. The role of J. Robert Oppenheimer is written with wide ranging emotional and musical tessitura. Gerald Finley's performance was human and involving, and his singing sumptuous. This was particularly apparent in the aria that closed Act I, a setting of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, chosen because it inspired Oppenheimer to name the bomb test site Trinity. It was the highlight of Dr. Atomic’s lyrical side. The writing of this opera was effective in not burying the story either in the development of technology, or in sentimentality for our lost innocence. The structure of the piece, building to the Trinity test, drummed up tension in the final ten minutes that really made my heart pound. As a whole the opera was thoughtful about human responsibility in the face of our ever increasing knowledge and movingly resonant, even topically so, but not preachy.

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,' and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet, dearely'I love you,' and would be loved faine,
but am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Thought and language, revenge and alienation (Books - Thought and Language & The Meaning of Night)

Lev Vygotsky was an influential psychological theorist who worked from the 1920s - 1930s in Russia. I know of him only as the mentor of the great neuropsychologist A. R. Luria who wrote the amazing story The Mind of a Mnemonist. This week my advisor loaned me one of Vygotsky's books, Thought and Language, hmm I wonder why I would be interested in that. I've just been reading the introduction by Alex Kozulin which, although it is written pedantically and with an excess of jargon, is the only biography of this fascinating man I know of. Sadly, he worked only 10 years before dying, not in one of Stalin's gulag's - that was my first guess - but of tuberculosis.

A student of literature, philosophy, and esthetics, Vygotsky plunged into psychology at the age of twenty-eight, and died of tuberculosis ten years later. A prodigal reader, he felt equally at home with commentaries on Shakespeare's tragedies, the philosophy of Hegel, and clinical studies of the mentally retarded. A profound theoretician, he was also a man of practise who founded and directed a number of research laboratories, including the first Russian Institute for the Study of Handicapped Children. As Stephen Toulmin so aptly remarked, Vygotsky carried an aura of almost Mozartian giftedness. And yet he lived in times that were hardly favorable to Mozarts.

Evidently he wrote a book in 1925 called The Psychology of Art, as it is about my two intertwined fields and was written our of life in Russia in the 1920s, I have got to get my hands on a copy. Kozulin observes, and I may paraphrase:

Vygotsky never believed that psychological inquiry should be considered as a goal in itself. For him, culture and consciousness constituted the actual subject of inquiry, while psychology remained a conceptual tool, important but hardly universal.

Vygotsky was primarily interested in the development of language in its relation to thought. Language and speech occupy a special place in his s psychological system because they play a double role. On the one hand, they are a psychological tool that helps to form other mental functions; on the other hand, they are one of these functions, which means that they develop in the context of one's culture.

Vygotsky observed that preconceptual, and even mythological thinking not only is characteristic of children and the mentally ill, but also forms the basis of the everyday, normal reasoning of adults.

I need another book to read, as my mother would say, like a hole in the head, but I am finding it fascinating and can comfort myself that it is school related even while I am really just reading it to enjoy myself.

I also began The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox yesterday evening. I needed an entertaining and cozy read and Middlemarch was not going to do it. The hyperbole that grace the cover of this 2-inch-thick paperback compare Cox to Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and the Brontes. Cox is a scholar, writer, and editor of literary Victoriana and burst onto the scene with this fictional work of his own a couple of years ago. It skillfully evokes his period of expertise while not falling prey to becomming an exhibit. It is little wonder so many readers have raved about The Meaning of Night if the first fifty pages are any indication.

Take the opening:

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.

It had been surprisingly - almost laughably - easy.

And then a short while later:

For you must understand that I am not a murderer by nature, only by temporary design and necessity - a justified sinner. There was no need to repeat this experimental act of killing I proved what I had set out to prove: the capacity of my will to carry out such a deed. The blameless red-haired stranger had fulfilled his purpose, and I was ready for what now lay ahead.

The budding psychologist in me says, 'yeah, right.' And so Cox establishes the driving force of this mock-Victorian epic of revenge. What I am enjoying most are the rituals Cox has created to seduce you into the world of his tale. The story is couched as an anonymous confession, written in the 1850s but discovered in 1948. It features a 'copy' of the original title page, an 'introduction' by an academic authority on Victoriana, and the story itself is liberally footnoted. While this might break the stream of one's reading to offer contextual information on the one hand, these footnotes, whether truthful or invented, are themselves part of the fictional universe. Its a theatrical framing device - like Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect. Hard core Brechtians might claim otherwise, but I have always found that attention to the artifice is useful in drawing an audience more deeply into the universe of the fiction because, if even the interruptions are part of it, one's belief becomes more imperterbable. It is the opposite of asking the audience to suspend one's disbelief - it rather invites one's belief. "Here is a manuscript," says the author. "Here are the circumstances under which it was discovered. I am the man who found it." This is all fiction. And then, as you read, up pops the frame - "Don't forget that this is a story," say the footnotes, but in the meantime the fact that this is a novel by a contemporary writer named Michael Cox has been buried three layers beneath the artifice of the frame. It is a device I have enjoyed using in my theater and opera productions because it doesn't take the audience's faith in the fictional world for granted and also because if the creator is imaginative, these devices are fun for the audience. This reader is certainly enjoying the way Cox has invited him into the world of The Meaning of Night at any rate.

The Ragazzo and I are off to the Met this afteroon. Doctor Atomic is by contemporary American composer John Adams and is about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atom bomb. I've been looking forward to this one.

Short stories, short dresses (Opera - Salome with Karita Mattila)

The short story seems to be poking its head up everywhere these days. First C.B.'s challenge this past month. Then Kate's post on Friday, featured an essay by Steven Millhauser that I assumed was in some book of his essays.

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe.

It turns out it is in today's New York Times Book Review and is a clever appreciation. Kate links to the entire essay.

Mark Thwaite posted on Friday from an address by the late David Foster Wallace about the humor of Kafka, but much of what I took away was about the story form in general.

...great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve....

Mark links to the entire piece. The way Wallace puts together words is fierce and incisive, I love the high standards he has for readers as well as writers.

Yesterday The Ragazzo and I saw the Met's fairly recent production of Richard Strauss's Salome. I always appreciate the Met's orchestra's playing of early 20th century music. Conductor Patrick Summers and the orchestra made gorgeously lush dissonnance. The contemporary production by Jurgen Flimms thankfully spared us from the awful quasi-1950s-bad bibilical-hollywood-epic aesthetic that usually graces more "traditional" productions of this opera. This production is the first I have ever seen that gets that the famous Dance of the Seven Veils is not a balletic interlude in which good dance and choreography are necessary to entertain us until we can get back to the singing, it is part of the drama in which Salome baldly mocks Herod's lust for her by doing a striptease. But this production belongs to Karita Mattila, the Finnish-born soprano and consummate stage-creature whose impressive feat is not the literal stripping of her clothes but the emotional full monty she is willing to do. Most of the rest of the cast are simply not at her level and either Flimm or the Met's staff directors remounting the production are unable or unwilling to see when the cast members are not even pretending to do what the text and the drama say they are doing. That or they don't have enough time to find good solutions. For example, Herod sings about the coldness and heat he feels and the sounds he hears when he begins to panic after Salome asks for the prophet Johanaan's head. But Kim Begley merely sings the words. Nothing happens to him as it would to any human being being frightened by the fact that he is having an unfamiliar experience and no one else around him seems to be also be having it. Even the simplest stage-craft types problems seem to be ignored. When Salome climbs down from a scaffold (in a white satin dress and heels) a couple of members of the court stand by the ladder to assist her in her descent (sensibly). However, they appear to know that she needs help only by telepathy, nothing was communicated to them by Salome or anyone else on stage. It is this sheer laziness of stage craft that I see time and again at the Met, that peppers their fanciest and even most astute productions with needless moments of amateurness. This pulls any audience member attentive to story or to the logical progression of human behavior right out of the action. Opera does not have to be unbelievable, but lack of attentiveness to detail will assure you that it will be.

Back to the highlight of this production - Karita Mattila, she plays Salome as an entitled brat, a sort-of 1930s Hollywood babydoll who, when she gets into her head that she wants Johanaan simply will not have it any other way. She is simpering, she is willful, but most of all she is bereft of love and is deeply sick because she can never have enough. Never mind the bare necessities of this role from a sheer vocal standpoint - octave plus intervals to jump, lush orchestrations to soar above on high sustained notes - Matilla has the technical chops, but a good performance asks for way more than that. She climbs that scaffolding like a gymnast, does a full split, she bumps and grinds, she stamps her feet like a child throwing a tantrum, she yells her head off in frustration, she lies on her back with her head hanging off the edge of the stage singing parts of the last scene and she does it all looking and sounding like a goddess and making her music sound inevitable. It is interesting to me that so much emphasis is placed on Salome being attractive. I suppose superficial beauty is desirable to make Herod's lust for her believable, but really Salome is alone and her desperation over that makes her horrific and unattractive. Mattila is willing to go there and it is that kind of nakedness on stage that I prize and that makes this performance such an intense and memorable one. This production is going to be simulcast HD to many movie theatres across the country next Saturday. If you are a little wary of twentieth century opera, Salome is a good introduction because it is short - under two hours, here is a link to the Met's website with information about the simulcast.

Now on from necrophilia to an unbelievable amount of reading on protein synthesis and, if I get the time, I'm going to make some middle eastern tomato soup with cumin, lemon and cilantro.

Culpability - It Takes a Village (Spitzer and the new Peter Grimes at the Met)

In this week of scandal mongering over Eliot Spitzer's frailties, it seems to me the entire press corps and the finger-wagging public could use a dose of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which I saw in a very effective new production at the Met yesterday. I've linked you to the Met's website which offers lots of background on the opera and production - video interviews, music clips and the like if you are interested. Britten was always a champion of the social outcast, whether from a comic angel with Albert Herring or a majestic one with Grimes. I wish Britten's work were programmed more often in New York's opera houses. His music is contemporary but accessible. You can tell it's of recent past (as opposed to, say, hearing strains of a Viennese waltz wafting through it) it pulls on the sonorities of hymn, folk tune, and the sounds of nature in such a way that you can nod with familiarity. It is definitely modern but its harmonies are not so cacophonous that you must merely endure them and each opera offers some memorable melodic themes if not exactly humable songs. They are written in English that is usually made understandable to the ear by the way the words are set in the music. The stories he chooses can be surprising and many have a message - often one about the responsibility assumed when judging others. Britten also does fine adaptations of great literary works - Melville's Billy Budd, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Finally, all his operas are real music dramas that are complex not because you can't follow the stories, but rather because they cannot really be pulled off without complex human beings in the central parts rather than the usual opera stick figures.

This production directed by John Doyle who just did the recent Sweeny Todd revival on Broadway, creates a looming landscape of blacks and greys that is visually really effective. A front "curtain" the entire width and height of the Met stage - and that is big - is a facade of wooden houses that is reminiscent of a Louise Nevelson sculpture. It is intentionally monolithic and non-realistic and yet you clearly know what it is. Doors and windows pop open and the town's people stand in them. Doyle makes good use of the narrative nature of the libretto by having this facade force both principles and the town's people well down stage (near the audience) addressing their narration full-front to the audience. He suggests the atmosphere of a fishing village rather than trying to recreate it in excruciating detail. As I mentioned, I found the opera's themes of individual and collective culpability as timely as ever. I don't think Doyle and Anthony Dean Griffey (Grimes) entirely solve the dramatic problem of who Peter Grimes is and from whence springs his violence, particularly in the first two acts. Griffey's performance in the third act has some moments of vulnerability in it that I wish he could dramatically "trace back" to the earlier part of the opera rather than relying on a histrionic sort of disorientedness. Even if Grimes doesn't know where his behavior comes from, it would help if we saw the seeds of his Act III behavior in Acts I and II. Patricia Racette as Ellen Orford had a nice moment or two. She is a very open performer which I always appreciate amidst the overwrought antics usually seen at the Met. Her music lies low for a soprano, and Racette has a rich voice, however I thought all that full singing low in her range compromised the beauty of her singing later in the opera. There were so many overtones in her sound by Act III that I could no longer hear the actual center of the pitch. There is also some "stage business," as people like to call it, that reeks of convention, with no roots in the drama of the moment. Auntie, her nieces, and other principle characters suddenly leap onto boxes to deliver solo lines in crowded scenes. While this may temporarily solve a problem of drawing attention to them on a crowded stage, the director and artists have made no sense of what they are doing from the point of view of their character's behavior in the story. This type of lazy stage craft removes me temporarily from the experience of the story. Ultimately it was usually the music in this production that drew me in. The tremendous sweeping tide of this score was captured in all its grandeur by conductor Donald Runnicles and the fantastic Met orchestra.

P. S. I hope the Met can find a way to silence the squeaking of the heavy set as it moves on its track after the quietly emotional exit of Grimes at the end of Act III. It is rare that an audience can be drawn in to respond with pure silence that hangs in the air for a moment. That build up and the entrance of the opera's narrative epilogue are squandered as we listen to the horrible tearing and squeaking sounds of the set.

A little necrophilia to go with your incest? A rave for Stratas as Salome.

I thought with my adulterous literature kick (Heat and Dust and The Master Bedroom) I would add a dash of incest and a little necrophilia, so on Alex Ross' suggestion we got the 1970s film of Struass' Salome with Teresa Stratas. Wow! Thank you Alex. If you are not familiar with Oscar Wilde's script, it's classical epic meets bad horror film. Pretty over the top. Add Richard Strauss' music and then that raucous lyricism can really, well, sing. Strauss loved those crazy women - Elektra, Salome, Helen, Ariadne. He had a taste for the overwraught. His music is gorgeously lyrical and sort of cacophonous at the same time. In Salome, Elektra and Die Frau Ohne Schatten, all Strauss operas, you can hear Vienna but the machine is broken and has been repaired with parts from the junk shop - a sort-of steam-punk classical music. It's gorgeously right for this material. He wrote more strictly lyrical stuff too - check out his Four Last Songs if you don't believe me. More ravishing songs do not exist.

Anyhoo, Salome, the production by Gotz Friedrich is in a sort of 1970s biblical epic style. I expected Charlton Heston to appear at any moment. Everyone is a bit over-the-top, even Stratas but she is also perfect. Astrid Varnay, one of the reigning Wagnerian sopranos from the 1940s and 50s plays Herodias - Salome's mom, like a drag queen. This is a role typically played by over-the-hill sopranos. It's not supposed to sound nice. And she really gets into it. The crunching of the scenery can be heard for miles and she probably used the conductor's baton as a toothpick afterwards. Speaking of which the conductor Karl Bohm produces sweat-producing theatrical tension in the famous final scene that, with Stratas' singing, brought it home in a way I've never heard in any other version. Bernd Weikl sounds gorgeous as Jokhanaan. All in all this DVD is a really satisfying blend of film and opera and features the most committed and sumptuously sung performance of this sex-starved girl-woman you are every likely to see. Stratas really gets her. This is a rave-worthy film.