Sketchy Notes on Les Troyens

An opera generalization: if I'm going to spend five daylight hours in an opera theatre, I'd rather be in the company of Hector Berlioz than Richard Wagner.  Lots of campy over-the-top self-indulgence in Berlioz but the same is true of Wagner and it is not nearly so hit-you-over-the-head irritating.    In any event, Les Troyens (in HD today) is not really one opera, it's two: one about Troy, one about Carthage one about love and one about war, one with lots an lots and lots of dance.  With so much of the day gone, I take time for only a few brief  notes:

• Susan Graham looks her age (she's 51) but for vocal performance, she is absolutely at the top of her game.


• Last-minute-replacement tenor Bryan Himel makes it look easy.  Which is not remotely to say that it is easy, except in the narrow sense that the role seems almost perfectly suited to his natural talents.


• When people talk about Met conductor Fabio Luisi, they still seem to wind up talking about his predecessor, James Levine. Still needs work on the branding, I'd say.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Nixon in China

I'm delighted I had (took) the chance to see the Met's HD Nixon in China today, and oddly, I'm just as glad I didn't see it when it first came out 24 years ago.

Why would this be?  The simple reason is that this is an opera where I suspect just everything has to be first-class to make it work.  And it's hard to think of any place that comes even close to the Met for supplying the support that the creators would need.

But more than that: we know so much more about Nixon than we did 24 years ago. We know more about how awful he was--but we've also come to to recognize what an interesting, challenging and in so many ways constructive person he could be.  And it is hard to think of any opera that offers a complex  hero with quite so much complexity and nuance.  Peter Sellars in a commentary mentioned Mussorgsky--I assume he was thinking of Boris Godunov--and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, two other stories of flawed and troubled leaders.  This is a useful insight and it is a compliment to Sellars--and, oddly, to Nixon--that Nixon is able to stand in their company.

It's an imperfect work, for all that--almost three separate works, each act in an entirely different style, and some parts work perhaps better than others.  In the first act, we see Nixon and Mao face to face in dialog.  Here the librettist (Alice Goodman) works almost straight from the script.  It's a delight to see/hear Nixon in all the creepy weirdness that we've come to know so well, and also Mao, floating free somewhere between sagacity and senility on a transit that neither he nor anyone else can quite follow.

The second act gives us Pat Nixon.  I was thinking before I saw her that she might be the toughest nut to crack in this effort at recreation--so taciturn, so bitterly private.  I think the creators did the right thing here: with Pat, in contrast to her husband and Mao, they simply didn't try all that hard to hew close to reality.  They created a woman who could give herself voice and who came across as a plausible Pat, quite aside from the question whether she was the actual Pat.

But the second act was largely dominated by that hoariest of operatic staples: a ballet.  Here it is that hoariest of Marxist staples, "The Red Detachment of Women," as recast by Mark Morris (and  it is one of my great regrets after a lifetime of cultural gormandizing that I passed up a chance to see the real "Red Detachment of Women" in London back in the 70s).  With one qualification that I'll get back to later, I thought it was a complete success: a full-blown panorama, at once funny and very scary, of the Chinese past, and of what the Maoists thought of their past.   It ends with a show-stopping coloratura (three high C's), from Madam Mao (Kathleen Kim), fit company for Olympia or the Queen of the Night.

The third act I thought didn't work as well.  The team tried to give us the back-narratives of the protagonists on interwoven musical lines.  It was worth a try: the idea of listening to Nixon and Mao as they to explain and justify themselves was promising as a  device for adding texture to their encounter.  But the creators seemed to have cluttered things up a bit by trying also to interweave some insights from Chou En-Lai and Henry Kissinger, and it didn't help (Pat Nixon and and Madame Mao came along for the ride).  The stage became too busy and unfocused.  I'm not sure, it might have been the libretto and the characterization, maybe the music, perhaps the singers--maybe something as simple as the fact that their voices were not well enough delineated.  But I found myself checking my watch.

Chou in particular was the one of the six who seems not fully thought out.  Chou has always gotten a bye from western observers of China as the thinking man's Maoist, the suave and cultivated cosmopolitan who rose above the vulgarities and excesses of his boss--yet how he could survive at the top so long without some blood on his hands would seem to be a question.  In any event,  there's a problem here, and   it is much like Pat Nixon's: Chou is too private,too guarded, too circumspect for easy presentation on stage.  You'd have to take liberties like the creators took with Pat.  For good reasons or bad, they didn't do so with Chou.  (the fact that Chou was dying of cancer didn't make it--aren't we all dying of something?).

Which leaves Kissinger and here I think the creators missed a great opportunity   With Nixon, they made a great success by presenting him in all his nuance.  Kissinger, they just left as a clown. This isn't fair and worse, it isn't good theater: Kissinger is at least as complex and interesting as his boss and it was a shame not to present him so.  Perhaps part of the problem is that they felt the need to run him into the ballet as a sexual predator.  But of all Henry's indisputable vices, I'd say that sexual predation is probably quite a long way down the list. Granted that  he liked to greet the photographers on the arm of a blonde a head taller than he, in a $7,000 frock.  But by all accounts, he didn't bother stay the night: he'd slap her in a cab at 10 o'clock so he could go home and tuck in with a good book.

These failures are defects, but not fatal defects.  Unlike so much new stuff, Nixon in China seems to have grown in esteem over its lengthening lifetime.  As I say, I think we understand Nixon better; very likely we understand John Adams better; perhaps we understand ourselves better.  It's an arresting piece of work and very much deserves its place in the very short list of new operas that might actually be worth seeing a second time.  

Afterthought: just how many instances of oral sex will henceforth be regarded as the de rigueur minimum for a modern opera to be taken seriously.  It's getting to be like the appearance of the brass band in Verdi.  Tan tan tara.

Update:   Mrs. Buce emails from home in Palookaville to recommend the NYT review by Max Frankel, who, whatever his chops as a music critic, enjoys the peculiar distinction of having been present on the tarmac at the original of the opening scene.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Don Pasquale

I watched the Met's HD Theatre performance of Don Pasquale today in kind of an echo chamber.  No fault of the theatre; it was all in my head.  We'd seen a live presentation of this production at the Met back in 2006.  Matthew Polenzani as Ernesto today was easy listening: his voice is smooth and engaging and his performance energetic. But in the background I kept hearing Juan Diego Flórez who though perhaps not as smooth contributed an edgy vocal comedy that nobody working right now seems able to match. Anna Netrebko as Norina was the same--but wait, no, she's not the same: in the meantime, she had a baby.  Her physique is more, shall we say maternal and her voice, while just as appealing is deeper or fuller, perhaps both.  I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that she is moving onto a different, more mature, sort of repertoire.

 One who stayed the same was Mariusz Kwiecien as Ernesto.     Structurally, it's an odd part.   He's a schemer, not a lover; but he and Netrebko have more interchange than she and the romantic lead do.  They've played it together now over several years, and as they say themselves in the interval, this kind of  comic narrative is essentially an improv piece, where you get to make up--and improv--your riffs as they go along.   They've got the chemistry and the energy to a high point now--so much so you can forget that the romantic lead is even there.

So, a good show.  But I mustn't forget to mention what may have been the musical high point of the day--of all things, the overture, conducted by James Levine.  We're told that this is the first time Levine has ever conducted Don Pasquale.  So, maybe he hasn't had time to go stale.  Still, his--and the orchestra's--rendering of the overture was one of the most fully-realized musical presentations I've ever heard from that pit; good enough so you were tempted to leave after the overture on the principle that the rest of the performance wasn't pretty good.  And it wasn't, but it was good enough, and I'm glad I didn't leave.

Live and Still Wriggling from the Met!

The estimable Alex (The Rest is Noise) Ross links to his own New Yorker piece about a non-fiasco at the Met--as he succinctly puts it, Tristan and two Isoldes (link). And as Ross so insightfully observes, this kind of screwup is not a bug, it's a design feature:

Any true fan who claims to attend opera solely in the hope of encountering sublime displays of vocal and dramatic mastery is putting you on. Certainly, operagoers cherish those rare occasions when all variables intersect to create the appearance of perfection; but they hold just as dearly to the memory of those unmagical nights when it all falls spectacularly apart. The gladiatorial aspect of opera is as old as opera itself. No other art form is so exquisitely contrived to create fiasco.

Yeh, we know how that is. Mrs. B still enjoys regaling newbies about the night we saw the third-string Carmen with her leg in a cast, wiggling her little fanny through the Habanera while kneeling on a table--and how she used plates for castanets, and how they shattered midway--and how Escamillo powers through the door, only to have the wall fall down around him. But it sets me to worrying: I've waxed ecstatic already over the virtues of the new HD transmissions--a new world of opera, all seen from the comfort of your own gummy seat at the Palookaville multiplex (link). Will we be seeing any more of this? How live is "live," anyway? Note that the blooper reel is not enough. Somehow or other, we want the raw, unadulterated accident. Ross again:

As [new General Manager Peter] Gelb’s Met lays greater emphasis on marketing stars, it shouldn’t forget the primitive thrill of the unexpected, which causes the most devoted fans to return night after night.

Quite right, too. And Palookaville wants its disasters, just like everyone else.