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Poppea at the Edinburgh Festival
Tragic dignity along with Platonic idealism long flushed into a canal, Venice's mid seventeenth century opera scene was real, the real having everything to do with what turned the public on. The Venetian audience was no doubt sexually quite sophisticated, and luckily the senior citizens of Britain must be even moreso as this experience was needed to appreciate director Barrie Kosky's Poppea, a fantasy on Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation of Poppea.
With only an occasional word of Italian to be heard, the guttural utterances of German actors were appropriately matched to the guttural tones of an orchestra of three cellos throbbing between the legs of their players, all this mixed with the lively innuendoes of worldly Cole Porter lyrics. And not a singer in sight.
The curators of the Edinburgh festival must have had some trepidation as this version from the Vienna Schauspielhaus of Monteverdi's last masterpiece could only be perceived as a centerpiece of the festival's focus on the first of the great Italian musical lyricists. Although a synopsis of Poppea's action could not be found in the program booklet a sort of apology could, this in the guise of a listing of director Kosky's weird sexual concepts for opera productions in Austria and Australia. While we all have come a long way and can handle most anything thrown at us by now, the fear lingered that the experience was going to be gross.
And of course it was, though it is hard to decide if the grossness was Monteverdi's opera itself, the very nerve to create a theatrical fantasy on an operatic masterpiece, or the compendium of sexual deviations that was so gracefully inserted into Monteverdi's libretto. Amore was a madame whose pleasures by now have included those of the table, her bejewelled fingers shooting sparks of the je-ne-sais-quoi that ignite and tease passions. Love had twisted Poppea's young husband Ottone into contortions, Poppea was an animal shooting sparks from her teeth and growls from her mouth, Nero's body and mind revealed indulgences that transcended the primitivism of his costume, a piece of sparkling black fabric that hung waist down like a pelt, matching that of Poppea. Seneca appears as a deaf mute, an inanimate statue, a masturbating voyeur.
These were actors whose entire physical, spiritual and vocal presences embodied Monteverdi's characters. We soon understood that while they were not singers, they would sing anyway, the entire text as well as the inserted songs -- both Cole Porter's and finally the magnificent Monteverdi lament and love duet, the rejected empress Ottavia using broken voiced harmonics and squeaks, the triumphant Poppea twisting her low predatory tones under the strange tenorial innocence of Nero. Not opera or even ballad singers, these actors were certainly instinctual musicians.
The generic contemporary German stage box held but two Louis XIV chairs that crashed silently from time to time and a small bathtub that shot into the space from time to time. Within this space the whore madame Amore guides Poppea to her goal, rids Nero of Seneca in a blood bath, thwarts Ottavia's revenge and sends Ottone and his new sweetheart Drusilla off into the sunset, presumably to continue singing Cole Porter songs to one another. This leaves Poppea and Nero alone, sitting passively side by side, professing love in this sudden emptiness. It is empty, and for once we have truly felt Monteverdi's deep intuition that it is suffering and not love that is the fun.
This evening of theatrical hyper-sophistication never strayed too far from Monteverdi musically, with L'incornazione di Poppea's most recognisable themes as well as subtle distillations of Monteverdi's musically elaborate recitatives woven into composer Kosky's musical texture. Theatrically Poppea kept the careful balances of tragicomedy even with or perhaps because of the audacious mixing of Cole Porter songs with Kosky's music. These songs, plus the use of the German language, an always useful barroom piano, the throaty sounds of cello, a greatly simplified love situation made a fine cabaret opera, perhaps musically too sophisticated for the larger theater public and theatrically too sophisticated for the larger opera audience. It was a perfect evening for Edinburgh's festival audience.
Unlike opera traditionally thought to be made of individual performances, theater prides itself on ensemble, thus no individual bows were taken (and so no names are here written). In a well-rehearsed simultaneous motion the actors recognised the musical and theatrical creator of the evening, Barrie Kosky who sat at the piano in the orchestra pit.
Orphée et Eurydice in Montpellier
When a production of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice is announced you usually take no notice of who is singing Orphée because you probably have never heard of him anyway. But such was not the case in Montpellier when one did notice because you had heard of him. With disbelief you saw it was Roberto Alagna, though the idea soon became explicable, remembering that Maria Callas had sung the Liebestod so why not Roberto Alagna singing Che faro senza Euridice (J'ai perdu non Eurydice).
Equally absurd was the idea that Marco Guidarini was conducting, the Genovese conductor who had made even the reticence of Pelleas et Melisande eloquently alive in Nice, who had fired its suppressed love triangle into a passionate eruption. Hardly the man to illuminate this signature, cool musical document of the French Enlightenment, calming the excessive grief of the Baroque within the intimate confines of the Rococo.
The Montpellier season itself seemed peculiar, programming first the famous Offenbach parody of the Orpheus myth last December before stating the myth two months later, one presumed in the pristine form Gluck had imposed upon it in this, his most famous reform opera.
These mysteries were quickly explained (03/02/08). Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice had been de-constructed by director David Alagna (Roberto's brother) in light of the latent high drama and deep intelligence in this Gluck masterpiece. He had given free rein to his own obviously formidable theatrical imagination, and was taking full advantage of the vocal and histrionic resources of his tenorissimo brother, Roberto. David (dah-veed) is hardly the first director to plumb the depths of Gluck's masterpiece and will not be the last. But this Orphée et Eurydice, while made of the Gluck Orphée, is anything but Gluck's opera, nor one Gluck could possibly have imagined, except perhaps for the Romeo et Juliette ending imposed by David Alagna, an ending that surely Gluck would have preferred to the happy ending imposed on him by convention.
Once past David Alagna's mute prologue, an interpolated first scene of a noisy wedding party that rudely punctuated Gluck's translocated incidental music, the second scene, now Gluck's own, unfolded with skillful paramedics pulling first the lifeless body of Euridice from an overturned, crushed bright red Renault, and then the inanimate body of her husband Orphée. There was no longer any possibility that this was not a parody, a fully and clearly defined made-for-television-movie reality opera supplanting opera's most hallowed pastoral myth. And then the cry "Eurydice" from the world-class Verdi tenor, with some of the biggest vocal coglioni (balls) around in full evidence. Any further fears of the banal were banished right along with all collegium musicum regrets.
Alagna lamented at Eurydice's tomb, supported by her grief stricken parents, surrounded by a sea of umbrella covered friends, the cellos of Guidarini's full blown orchestra throbbing sobs, the crushed red Renault replaced by a long black hearse. Overcome Orphée fell into the pile of dirt about to cover Eurydice's coffin, his face and chest against the stage floor that now became a massive sounding board for his, and Gluck's magnificent Chiamo il mio ben cosi (Eurydice, Eurydice, ombre chère).
Amor, baritone Marc Barrard in a floor length black leather cloak, gave Orphée his options. The long black hearse brought Orphée to heaven's waiting room, a rather crowded worldly mortuary for souls in transition. Knowing stratospheric travel, contemporary audiences understand that temperatures are frigid in the heavens, thus Guidarini's Mahlerian trombones sounded their chilling tones, bringing into sight a corps de ballet of suspended frozen bodies. That of Eurydice identified, the long black hearse arrived to bring her back to earth, not without the well-known discussion passionately voiced by the beautiful Serena Gamberoni. Furious with Orphée, she first made love with the tall and handsome Amor in its front seat.
The grief of the Alagnas' Orphée was real, it was wrenching, and it was fully considered in the finest Gluckian manner, but no longer with his formidable eighteenth century emotional discipline. This new Alagna perspective was a forging of the considerable art of twentieth century operatic hyper verismo with twenty-first century conceptual art, realized with the considerable resources of one of France's finest opera companies. Roberto Alagna is a phenomenon. As much an artist as he is a tenor, he gave full realization to these often contradictory terms in this performance, putting the heated vocal posturing of the heroic tenor in service to cool, smart conceptual art.
Among the triumphs of the evening were the visually stunning stage pictures created by director/designer Alagna, with the costumes of Carla Teti. But most remarkable of all was the cool control exercised by David Alagna, never forcing his staging beyond the boundaries determined by Gluck's reformist intentions and the immense wit of his own vision. With this Orphée et Eurydice held always in such delicate balance he proved himself a true artist.
Marco Guidarini, the Alagnas' willing musical collaborator, brought an exploration of color and a musical urgency to Gluck's score that added new luster to France's centuries old tradition of orchestral art. It cannot be left unsaid that the flute solo in the blessed spirits ballet music has never been played more beautifully.
The Montpellier Orpheus ritual complete the excited cast took their bows, the wildly enthused audience showered the stage with flowers. Finally, and only finally did Roberto bring his brother David onto the stage for a bow to a chorus of boos.
Wozzeck in Barcelona
Arriving in Barcelona one is greeted by a giant phallus, a 32 floor architectural landmark, appropriately the offices of the local water company (the design of the erotically obsessive French architect Jean Nouvel). Though this, the Torre Agbar, is far surpassed in audacity by the utter insanity of the multiple portals and towers (higher ones are yet to come), of the Gaudi's maniacal cathedral Sagrata Familia.
Clearly Barcelona is a no-holds-barred town, proven yet again in its recent production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the Gran Teatre de Liceu. The director, Calixto Bieito, by now infamous in opera circles for productions in a theatrical language based on sexual violence and bathrooms, does not disappoint.
Though Buchner and Berg's Wozzeck pisses along the road within their first scenes (gepist hat, auf der Strasse gepist hat, gepist), Bieito's Wozzeck discretely does not. Not to worry, there is plenty of blatant sexual and bathroom action to come. These elements are indeed the glass, stone, steel and stucco, the building blocks of Bieito's theatrical architecture. Though Alban Berg admonishes us not to distract ourselves from Wozzeck's world by focusing our attention on the musical language, Bieito's need is a bit more complex, as his language is so self-conscious. Ultimately we need to allow ourselves to admire its wit, because it is brilliantly expressive.
The audacity of Bieito's Wozzeck is not his use of extreme, generally ugly sexual images, after all this has been the stuff of opera from the beginning. It is rather the cheek to take one of the revered masterpieces of the repertory, in fact the greatest modernist musical monument, and transform it into a story that is yet even further from the original history of the condemned barber, into one that has uncanny reference to contemporary Barcelona, one that gives little reference to the Buchner or Berg re-workings of this 1824 news item, and for that matter offers no respect for the modernist moment in cultural history.
Bieito's Wozzeck is not a victim, he is a hero, proving himself human in a world made inhuman by the grim necessity of increasing the annual percentage growths of the national product. He seeks value in his human relationship with Marie, and when his love for Marie is forsaken by her frantic pursuit of material satisfaction, he purges himself of this love. This story told in Bieito's striking theatrical language, in unforgettable images.
The primary image is the guts of an industrial plant, complex in its need to move liquids from process to process. At the same time this image is of human guts, where finally, in Bieito's world, we feel ourselves, physically and emotionally. We will see significant industrial and human connections disintegrate -- as Wozzeck's world disintegrates we see the captain shave Wozzeck, we even feel a certain poignancy when the captain humps Wozzeck, when the doctor makes love to a dead woman, and when the gas-masked child is placed on a tin toilet. We understand when Wozzeck and Marie each cleanse themselves in a ritual shower.
Marie is the protagonist in Bieito's Wozzeck, the pursuer of the golden Drum-major and his gold, sexually defined by serving the quick, brutal satisfaction of fellatio. She is finally the tragic figure in Bieito's Wozzeck, with full recognition of the sacrifice she will make to purify Wozzeck.
Of wrenching effect is Marie's reading the Bible's Mary Magdalene, sung over a battered, bloody Wozzeck lying on the stage still, from the previous dormitory scene where he was brutally beaten and then pissed on by his fellow men. And then the murder scene, Wozzeck and Marie sitting in white light on one of the pipes in an effect of utter stillness, Marie offering herself to Wozzeck as his sacrifice.
The mesmerizing fifth invention, in d minor, the purification of Wozzeck, as naked men and women, in prime and pure physical condition slowly emerge through the maze of pipes -- human images far from the bloated bodies of Wozzeck, the Captain and the Doctor that are Bieito's world. And the final "hop hop" scene, with the child in his disfiguring gas mask, an inhuman, unredeemed creature.
The stunning performance of Marie was by soprano Angela Denoke, taking her bow with the child, unidentified in the cast list, who was on-stage for a good part of the opera delivering at last a finely sung, young "hop hop." Franz Hawiata, Herbert Delamboye and Markus Hollop gave committed, remarkably physical performances of Wozzeck, the Captain and the Doctor respectively. Reiner Goldberg was the repulsive Drum-major. Initially the Berg Wozzeck sounded all-wrong in this context, though soon enough the music melded with the stage into the Bieito Wozzeck, the conductor Sebastian Weigle a sympathetic collaborator in this new telling of this old story.
The audience was palpably gripped. It was at times tough going, and some few of the audience exited from time to time, understandably.
In February the Nice Opera mounts its Wozzeck. One can wish for an homage to Berg's masterpiece. If so, we can admire brilliance of the building blocks of his theatrical architecture -- his musical language. Finally we can commiserate with a man lost in a hostile world, betrayed by his fellow men. A Wozzeck no less and no more real than Barcelona's >Wozzeck, or for that matter Wozzeck himself.
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