More Munich Opera: Logistics

Another fragment on Munich opera--this one I share with almost every American opera goer who ventures to Germany and keep his eyes open. The point is not the variety and the quality (both admirable) but the sheer fact that they so so much of it.   We say that "opera houses all over Germany" produce "an opera every night."  Inevitably, I don't know exactly what that means ("all over"?  "every night"?), but it's close enough to true that we can treat it as given: consider the number of not-quite-first-tier American cities who count themselves cultured if they can stage just one a year.    This has to mean a ton of taxpayer subsidy and yes, I can think of so many other, seemingly more appealing, causes to which the euros could be put.  But I'm impelled to offer three observations, all of them probably familiar to anyone who has actually thought about it.

One: I marvel at the opportunities for steady work among opera singers (and, I guess, pit musicians).  It must mean that there is a cadre of able music-makers--not superstar material, perhaps, but talented enough--who have the opportunity to polish their craft and get as much out of themselves as they have to offer. Or  maybe they superstars, just working off a long apprenticeship: Verdi himself wrote a dozen operas over a dozen years before he hit the trifecta with Rigoletto, Traviata and Trovatore (it's wandering but I guess you could say the same thing about Shakespeare--a dozen or more experiments--some quite good-- before he totally nails it with Midsummer Night's Dream).  Query, can anybody name a product of the German opera house system with a similar career trajectory?

Two: the downside of all this is that they must not have time to rehearse.  Yes, yes, I'm sure there are offsite practice halls but it can't be (is unlikely to be) anywhere near the same as being in the real house, with the real echoes and the real timbre.  And there are also simple problems of logistics. I hear tell (I can't find the source right now) of a Carmen who came onstage and realized she couldn't find her tenor. "Où se trouve Don José?" she is said to have said. --"Suivez-moi, madame!" responded a gentlemanly super as he led her downstage.

And three: sets:  I know that the  Met prides itself on being able to change sets about as fast as the pit crew tightens wheel bolts on a NASCAR competitor.  But on a German schedule, you can't really make too many demands.  Couple tight schedules with the Germans' penchant for really loony staging and you are bound to have some train wreck results. Case in point, last week's Marriage of Figaro.* The curtain rises on the bare interior of a box, painted blinding white--so blinding that I kept wanted to shout "okay, I'll betray my loved ones--just stop making my eyes hurt!"  

But that's not all, folks. The later scene, though not a painful, was even sillier.  Mozart fans will recall that what we've got here is a lot of horseplay in the garden at night.  The very stuff of comedy, and how do you create the garden effect on an indoor stage?  Oh, I have it!  You drape the whole thing in cheesecloth (yes?) and let the singers tumble and stumble among the folds while they try to find their pitch!  So in addition to trying to keep track of who is who, and to check the supertitles in a language you don't understand anyway, there is the extra problem of repeatedly reminding yourself just why everyone is wandering around in an exploded laundry.
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*A moment' perfunctory research informs me that this production is not new: actually old enough to drink beer in Munich.  So maybe my argument has nothing to do with anything. Whatever; I like it and I'm keeping it.

More Munich

More loose change about Munich:

• I do love that public transport. Ain't cheap but what is these days?  And it is friction free.  You buy a ticket with a credit card, from the machine. It works first time, unlike Paris, where it never seemed to work at all.  You get a multi-day pass; you validate once and then Bob's your uncle: you hop on, hop off as convenient.  If you go bare you risk being tagged with a 40 Euro fine but in a week, I never saw an inspector.  I suspect the main risk is that someday you just forget to put the ticket in your pocket.

The whole system is well signed and it is hard to make a mistake but that's the beauty part: if you do make a mistake--get on the wrong trolley, get off at the wrong stop--you can just debark and try again.  No fumbling for change transfers, etc.

• But now, about bicycles.  Munich is flat and so bike-friendly (except, I suppose, in snow).  Like Amsterdam, but that's the interesting part: Amsterdam cyclists chug along on old clunkers at a crawl. Munich wheels are fancier (though not as fancy as you might expect from the town that invented the BMW).  More important, Munich cyclists like to go fast.  It's not as if they are trying to hit you; they just assume you know the rules and if not, why then it's your problem (and guess what: most pedestrians, not fancying death or mutilation, just get out of the way).

Bike lanes?  Strictly speaking, yes, and everywhere.  But this is the one part of the system that really does not work.  One, the markings can be really obscure, especially at corners or crossings.  And two, the cyclist's attitude is, ahem, casual. One would think the lanes sort into "bike" and "non-bike."  But for the cyclists, the choice seems to be "default" and "whenever convenient."

• One more--actually, two more--stories that confirm our prejudice about Germans.  One, a 70ish lady knocking back a coffee at the train station. At her elbow is a backpack--I'd guess 50 pounds.  She is carefully decked out in sensible travel togs and I'm betting the pack is sensibly decked out also.  Thing is, this is not a street person: she's just a citizen on walkabout.

And two--Mrs. B noted this one--couples on the transit. Elderly, which is to say a bit younger than ourselves. Both lean, and both tanned.  Well, it is July, so just back from holiday?

This is puzzling, particularly because of a third fact that comes to mind. That is: Munchkins (yes?) aren't as fat as I remember them. Ten years ago they had stereotypical beer bellies (at least the guys).  These days, a few.  And yet you still seem to see them kicking back with those industrial-strengh glasses (I'm betting the name is "medium").  Sometimes for breakfast.

• And now, two more gustatory insights, but more bewildering. The  subject is food.

One, dignified lady in her 50s in for a late lunch.  She ordered, and them demurely devoured (a) a piece of Sacher torte; (b) a cup of cocoa; and ( c) a glass of prosecco.

Two: another one of those dignified older couples--lean again and this time tall. They ordered giant iced coffees mit  schlag and, I think, a dollop of vanilla ice cream. She honors the treat's arrival by upending into it the sugar canister. Go figure.

• And a surprise.  Food's pretty good, actually.  Of course we were eating somewhat high end bit the stuff in the supermarket was at least acceptable, often much better than that.

• One puzzle: what's this about dressing up for the opera?  You see dressy people at the Met, but also tramps (that would be me, your honor).  San Francisco is mostly tramps.  Munich--well, I guess they don't throw you out if you show up in tee-shirt and jeans, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone in the lobby mutter the German equivalent of "you're not from around here, are you, buddy?" 

So, lovely place.  Pity about the Nazi past.  We did listen for a while to a tour guide--woman of 40 or so--who talked frankly about the evil years, pointed out the (beer hall?) where the party got its name, described the route of the comic-opera putsch.  She also showed us the site of the 72 Olympics and waxed lyrical about what a success they were. Yes, but.

Home Again (Munich)

Back again--this time from Munich, with a side trip to Bregenz in Austria, this last for a taste of the Bregenzer Festspiele, hitherto unknown to me. That would comprise--let me count here--ah, yes, six--operas in about ten days which is perhaps almost too much for any taste, but at least enough to justify such a trip.  In sum: inevitably the performances varied somewhat in quality although happily. there really wasn't a clinker in the lot.

The array did include on bona fide premier--something called Tales from Vienna Woods, but no, not that one, another one, on a script by (it says here) "the Austro- Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth" (who?).  The program notes describe it as "a bitter satire about the mendacity and brutality of the petite-bourgeoisie," so no surprise that von Horváth tried to get a score out of Kurt Weill, he of The Threepenny Opera.  Evidently his efforts came to no avail and it lay dormant until this current production, with libretto by Michael Sturminger (who also directed) and music by HK Gruber. On that last you may well say "who?" again but evidently he has a certain celebrity in Austria (where he was born), both as a composer and as conductor of the BBC Philharmonic (local boy makes good). I hadn't done my homework and my German is zilch so the narrative was pretty much lost on me, but if you close your eyes (and stay awake) the music is listenable in its post-Schoenbergian BBC sort of way. Still, you'd better be warned: if you really want to hear it, you'd better hop on over to Bregenz right now, in time for the performance on August 3, its last in the current run, not likely to be repeated (I suspect) for a long while.

Far more memorable was the other Bregenz offering--The Magic Flute ,decked out as what may be the most expensive and dangerous opera performance I've ever seen (and yes, I did see Julie Taymor's giant puppet version (or giant-puppet version) at the Met back in 2006). Evidently Bregenz does this sort of thing: they've got am artificial island offshore but within earshot of an outdoor seating array; it just cries out for traditional spectacle crossbred with Cirque de Soleil.  At least one of my traveling companions thought Mozart would be offended by this travesty but I'm not so sure.  The music is glorious in any costume and the Masonic symbolism, if you care about that sort of thing, comes through just as well on the back of a giant plastic turtle as it does on Julie Taymor's massive jungle gym.  Now that I think of it, my first Magic Flute was the Ingemar Bergman's film version.  I saw that in Hartford, CN, around Christmas, 1975, where I was a little seasick-drunk on cheap sweet holiday sherry, and a script that could survive those limitations is surely ready for anything.

Back in Munich, perhaps a high point was that we got to here Anja Harteros twice--once in the title role of Tosca and later as Leonora in La Forza del Destino.  Here she is doing "Pace, Pace, Mio Dio," in the same staging and the same house a few months back:

I'll save a few more scattered thoughts about Munich and its opera for another day.