Così Followup: What Was Eating Renée?

I've been meaning to follow up on The Curious Incident at the HD Opera the other day--specifically, Renée Fleming as intermission hostess, insisting that the libretto of Così somehow required an apology, as you might apologize if, for example, your football team bore a name that is an ethnic slur.  Of course we wouldn't say that sort of thing today, we nice people, but those were olden times and the music is beautiful so let's forgive ourselves a bit of impropriety.

Say what? Impropriety? How odd. 

The plot is easily told, almost fairy-tale in its simplicity: in the first act, the ladies promise undying love; their lovers depart. In the second a act--uh oh. At the end, a kind-of-a sort of-a-resolution, except maybe not.

Now, I suppose you might find this simply funny (cue: "You find that funny?")  Perhaps more likely, you read it (as I suspect Mozart intended it to be read) as a kind of bleak, autumnal wisdom.  It's mutable, this humanity.  What you thing will last forever--it doesn't last forever, and the chances are you don't even want it to last forever (are you really looking forward to meeting Granny in heaven?  Tell the truth, now.  Really?).  It's the paradox of existence: enjoy yourself, but don't kid yourself. Stuff happens.

With Renée, my first thought was--who wrote her script? Does she have a banker problem?  A political commissar?  But no--on second thought, my guess is that this was her doing, and that the sentiment is deeply felt.  I mentioned before that I read her memoir, which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.   I thought it a superb account of how to live in the arts, how to build a career.  But it struck me also as tinged with an odd note of pathos, in the sense of: if I am so successful and famous, why am I not having more fun?

To which, were I her friend, I would say: Renée, love, welcome to hard times.  You are one of fortune's favored, a gift to all humanity and I delight in your success.  But Renée, love, stuff happens.  Even to the likes of you, love, even to the likes of you.

In her perplexity last Saturday, Fleming seemed to try to spin it into a kind of feminist message, as if to say not that "people don't act that way;" rather more on the lines of "women don't act that way, and it is piggy of us to suggest that they do."    Sugar and spice and everything nice (she seems not to have noticed that the men in  Così  are set forth as bearing an equal (perhaps greater) burden of comic humanity--but maybe for the men, it is no more than justice?).  But I don't think she had her heart in the larger political agenda.  It was these women she was thinking about, or this woman, Fiordeligi, whose transition is so central the theme.  Or more precisely, this woman, Renée, who has sung  the part often enough. Personal note, it was my great good fortune to see her sing it there back in '96, and I count it as one of the defining opera occasions of my life.

So, dear friend, go with the autumnal-wisdom flow.  Don't feel any need to try to explain it away and don't ever, ever, try to apologize.  If you haven't got the message yet, you might look back to an earlier New York arts-darlng:

By the time you swear you're his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying,

Lady, make a note of this —

One of you is lying.

First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11

Being, of course, Dorothy Parker. Me, I think I'll revel in Fiordeligi's great (albeit ironic) anthem of faith:

Met HD Così

We took in the Met's HD showing of Così fan tutte and it certainly lives up to its notices: it's a bravura performance and the star of the show is James Levine, powering both the orchestra and the cast with a grit and drive that I've never seen before. Someone in an intermission interview said that it's the rhythm and I bet that's right: for such a spare and elegant story there are some fiercely complicated intertwinings in the score and it's possible for even the best of singers to get lost in a puddle. Not so here: everything fit together. The Levine story is an opera-sized story itself, of course: after two hers, during which most people thought we'd never see him conduct again here he is back again, evidently to show himself that he's still got it and that he is determined to squeeze the juice out of any chance that remains to be offered him.

The singing itself was fine, but that's the thing: I've seen better. I still think Cecelia Bartoli owns Despina and  I'd say that Paolo Montarsolo brings a dark elegance to Don Alfonso that his hard to match.  The only one in the current cast who seems so exactly suited to his role would be Rodion Pogossov as Gugliemo.  But it hardly mattered; Levine (or whoever it was) succeeded in teasing a fully realized performance out of everybody on the stage.  It must be a delight--and a challenge--to work for this guy.

Met HD Prince Igor

We took in the Met's HD of Borodin's Prince Igor today.  It was a first for both of us and I must say I liked it although I'd probably have to see it a couple more times really to get my mind around it.  Meanwhile, a few takeaways:

• They say of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that the real hero is the chorus.  Maybe, but much truer here: I can't think of any other opera in which the chorus exercises quite so much narrative heft.

• Can you name any other opera which fixes so much compassion on the plight of a nameless peasant girl,married off as a sexual convenience and then discarded?  Or presents the marauder and his friends so unambiguously as a gang of loutish frat rats?

• Is there any other opera--Russian or otherwise--that gives God so slender a role in determining the outcome of military conflict?

• As a reconstruction of the only opera by an important Russian composer, this new production would seem to be an important Russian cultural event.  Yet it seems to have been hatched in Turin and launched and now we see it launched in New York City. Why isn't it at the Mariinsky, and where is Gergeiv?  Netrebko? Come to think of it, where is  Putin?

Fun fact: It appears that Putivi, locus of this Russian masterpiece, is in the Ukraine.

Met HD Rusalka

Mr. and Mrs. Buce share of a vivid memory of their first visit together to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  It was 1990.  The show was Rusalka, with Renée Fleming.  It was coming on summer. We were way up in the balcony, and it was hot.

The trouble is, this memory has to be wrong in each critical respect.  The Met first sowed Rusalka in 1993.  And Fleming didn't play it there until 1997.  Must have been some other opera, or star, or year or whatever.

Give us this much, though: we have seen Rusalka more than once, more than twice in our long and varied career, and we know that it is Fleming's signature role.  Indeed while she did not play it in full at the Met until 1997, the showpiece aria-"Song to the Moon"--was her breakthrough performance as a competition piece at the Met back an 1988.   It has formed a sort of arc for her career.

Even if we didn't see her before, we did see her again yesterday in the Met HD.  It was a fascinating and rewarding performance.  With this kind of history, it was bound to be a Met crowd-pleaser.  It might even have been Fleming's choice--one gets the impression she has been able to dictate he choices of late. Still, I have to wonder how much she enjoyed it.  She was, granted, in good voice.  And while she's not my favorite Met superstar, I have to say I've always liked and admired her (or at least, ever since I read her fascinating memoir/briefing-book on how to build a career).  She's careful and disciplined and never phones anything in  Stll. when all is said and done, it is still an ingenue role: about a nymph and her sexual awakening.  Fleming is 55.  They had her up a tree--really.  You could see she was worrying about getting  her wig entangled in the branches.  Or worse, simply falling out.  You've got to think she is wondering whether, at this time of life, she should be looking for other uses for her talents.

It was nonetheless, as I say, a rewarding performance--much mores for us than it was 23 years ago (heh!) that first time.  I, at least, have a better sense of Czech culture--the folk tales arising out of the bogs and forests (I think also of the Pripet Marshes, not that far east, and of Carol Burnette, singing of "The Swamps of Home.)  I think I can understand Dvořák better--as an orchestral composer, even if he might not have had quite the knack for opera (I mean, what opera composer would let his Soprano go mute through the second act).  I think I can appreciate the kind of scoring that just couldn't have happened before Wagner (same for Verdi's Falstaff, almost exactly contemporaneous).

I must say I also got something out of those snippets of intermission interview that have become a staple of Met HDs.  I appreciated Piotr Beczala that he's not there to be a star; that he is part of a performance and he wants to make the whole thing work. I was greatly intrigued by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the conductor, recounting how he tells his orchestra that they are there to perform "three Dvořák symphonies"--which nails both the virtue of the production and its limitation. And you've got to love Dolora Zajick as the witch--a role which, it says here, she also played in the Met's first outing back in 1997. She knows who she is and what she can do. And for what it is worth, turns out that she is only seven years older than the star.

Here's a treeless rendition of the "Song to the Moon" from the Proms in 2010: