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"It's very English, but in the worst possible way."
Ever have one of those crazy dreams that laden with deep Jungian symbolism that you couldn't quite grasp, like there were these amazing insights seeping out of your subconscious that you could get tantalising close to unraveling without succeeding?
Ever have someone else tell you a dream like that in excruciating detail so that you could marvel at the complexity of their inner world and be seduced by its portentuous enigmas?
FOR THREE HOURS?
If you answered "Yes" to the last two questions, well, set that experience to music and you'll have some appreciation for my opera experience last night.
Part of me really wanted to like A Midsummer Marriage. I'm always complaining about how Lyric trots out the warhorses with stultifying regularity, always wishing for more modern opera, always sniffing in contempt at those who leave early at anything more "difficult" than Madame Butterfly. But last night, I was one of those people.
It's really not a terrible opera. Like the vicar's egg, parts of it are excellent: The music is extremely pleasant to listen to. It just doesn't have a helluva lot to do with the action on stage and you'll search in vain for a theme that unifies one bit of business with another. Much of this business is rather entertaining to watch, however. I must say, I don't have issues with the production: The singing was outstanding, the lighting was gorgeous (apart from one misstep in which the shadow of a lower tier of spotlights was projected on the stage), the set was ingenious and lovely, the blocking was quite good overall, and much of the dancing was absolutely thrilling.
Perhaps if I had prepared myself for an evening of song and dance rather than an opera, I would've had a fine time. The problem is that it's all less than the sum of its parts and there's only one person to blame: The librettist--in this case, the composer. That's you're first warning sign, btw.: You can get by with this is you're a freaking genius, like Wagner. Even if you're an excellent librettist but a middling composer (ciao, Boito!), you can turn out something respectable. (Marguérite has better music than Mefistofele, no question, but it's a far inferior adaptation of Faust.)
But, as the programme tells us, "there are those who say that T.S. Eliot did the world a disservice when he encouraged Tippett to write his own libretti." What it doesn't tell you is that these people are absolutely correct. It's been years since I watched a SNL-alumni movie, so I can't remember when I last spent so much time cringing with each new line. Y'all know how descriptivist my leanings are, yet I still think Tippett should be strung up for abuse of the English language. The sentence that pushed me over the edge was "Nothing's there to be lost", but the text is full of senseless inversions like that which serve no purpose except to shout, "Lookee here, I'm writin' POEMTRY!" The half-assed alliteration ("free, fresh, fair"), leaping in at seemingly arbitrary points, is especially irritating. It made me long to go home and read some old Germanic Stabreim in order to remember why it can be worth doing.
Tippett calls the piece "a comedy", but there's no comedy in it (except perhaps unintentionally). There's no drama either, only hystrionic incident. The plot is borrowed from Die Zauberflöte, but that opera has characters. Yes, we know their struggles are allegorical, but we're still invested in their outcome. Tippett give us only archetypes. As we left after the second act, our seatmates were chiding us that we wouldn't find out how it ends. We couldn't care less. If Jenifer were sealed underground forever and Mark lost in the skies above, never to see her again, it would be no skin off our backs. The whole thing is just Mark's silly dream anyway, so the stakes are undercut from the very beginning.
The only recognisable humans in the piece are our Papageno and Papagena, Jack and Bella, and ever they are somewhat hampered by their symbolic roles. As The Working Man, Jack suffers through a heavy-handed, deathly-literal scene of exploitation at the hands of The Big Boss in Act One. Nevertheless, his effective duet with Bella to open Act Two was probably the highlight of the production. Act Two is a vast improvement on Act One if only because there's very little dialogue in it. (The main characters don't feature at all--how's that for sustaining dramatic tension? It calls to mind the MST3K refrain "Meanwhile, in another movie...") The midsection is a suite of dances representing nature in three seasons, which I enjoyed so much that I contemplated staying until the end after all--and then came another injection of painfully pseudo-profound sophomoric verse and we were outta there.
I was at least relieved to find out that it premiered in 1955, since it made it easier to accept the revolting sexual politics. Lyrically, the aforementioned duet is like a no-irony version of "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors, but it makes sense to have such thoroughly 50s sentiments in a work that's...well, actually from the 50s. Of course, to understand is not to forgive, but if he'd stopped there, I could've dealt. Instead, he follows up with a musical Maybelline commercial as Bella tells Jack in detail how precisely she applies cosmetics to reveal the "real" her. (This is after she's fled in girly-girl horror at seeing a poor little bird about to be killed by a raptor and had to be comforted by her big strong hunk of blue-collar manhood.)
Overall, it's the most rampantly heterosexual opera I think I've ever seen--far more het than Billy Budd is gay, if you can believe that. The underlying ("overlying", I should say, given the complete lack of finesse with which it is continually hammered) theme is the interaction of the female principle (which is, of course, more spiritual and moral) with the male (which is all rutting and bestial). You could say it's just Tippett being a product of his time, but what makes it so much harder to take than the blatant sexism of a 19th-century verismo opera is the way in which he tries to present the mores of a specific place and time as the natural expression of ancient and eternal biological truths.
I made a desperate attempt to stay interested by substituting in my head a libretto drawn from the works of H.P. Lovecraft (making the mysterious "Ancients" the horrifying Old Ones and adding a disturbing threat of "alienage" to the whole matter of marriage), but it didn't pan out. Yet I'm still looking forward to other contemporary operas. We've have had good luck overall and we're starting to get an idea what works. All the successful ones have been adaptations, and plays or movies (Mourning Becomes Electra, A Wedding) make for much better source material than novels (The Great Gatsby, Candide). Even the conceit of taking place within a dream can be employed successfully, as Un re in ascolta proved some years ago. One simply has to make the dream events matter by tying them to real-life developments.
Ever have someone else tell you a dream like that in excruciating detail so that you could marvel at the complexity of their inner world and be seduced by its portentuous enigmas?
FOR THREE HOURS?
If you answered "Yes" to the last two questions, well, set that experience to music and you'll have some appreciation for my opera experience last night.
Part of me really wanted to like A Midsummer Marriage. I'm always complaining about how Lyric trots out the warhorses with stultifying regularity, always wishing for more modern opera, always sniffing in contempt at those who leave early at anything more "difficult" than Madame Butterfly. But last night, I was one of those people.
It's really not a terrible opera. Like the vicar's egg, parts of it are excellent: The music is extremely pleasant to listen to. It just doesn't have a helluva lot to do with the action on stage and you'll search in vain for a theme that unifies one bit of business with another. Much of this business is rather entertaining to watch, however. I must say, I don't have issues with the production: The singing was outstanding, the lighting was gorgeous (apart from one misstep in which the shadow of a lower tier of spotlights was projected on the stage), the set was ingenious and lovely, the blocking was quite good overall, and much of the dancing was absolutely thrilling.
Perhaps if I had prepared myself for an evening of song and dance rather than an opera, I would've had a fine time. The problem is that it's all less than the sum of its parts and there's only one person to blame: The librettist--in this case, the composer. That's you're first warning sign, btw.: You can get by with this is you're a freaking genius, like Wagner. Even if you're an excellent librettist but a middling composer (ciao, Boito!), you can turn out something respectable. (Marguérite has better music than Mefistofele, no question, but it's a far inferior adaptation of Faust.)
But, as the programme tells us, "there are those who say that T.S. Eliot did the world a disservice when he encouraged Tippett to write his own libretti." What it doesn't tell you is that these people are absolutely correct. It's been years since I watched a SNL-alumni movie, so I can't remember when I last spent so much time cringing with each new line. Y'all know how descriptivist my leanings are, yet I still think Tippett should be strung up for abuse of the English language. The sentence that pushed me over the edge was "Nothing's there to be lost", but the text is full of senseless inversions like that which serve no purpose except to shout, "Lookee here, I'm writin' POEMTRY!" The half-assed alliteration ("free, fresh, fair"), leaping in at seemingly arbitrary points, is especially irritating. It made me long to go home and read some old Germanic Stabreim in order to remember why it can be worth doing.
Tippett calls the piece "a comedy", but there's no comedy in it (except perhaps unintentionally). There's no drama either, only hystrionic incident. The plot is borrowed from Die Zauberflöte, but that opera has characters. Yes, we know their struggles are allegorical, but we're still invested in their outcome. Tippett give us only archetypes. As we left after the second act, our seatmates were chiding us that we wouldn't find out how it ends. We couldn't care less. If Jenifer were sealed underground forever and Mark lost in the skies above, never to see her again, it would be no skin off our backs. The whole thing is just Mark's silly dream anyway, so the stakes are undercut from the very beginning.
The only recognisable humans in the piece are our Papageno and Papagena, Jack and Bella, and ever they are somewhat hampered by their symbolic roles. As The Working Man, Jack suffers through a heavy-handed, deathly-literal scene of exploitation at the hands of The Big Boss in Act One. Nevertheless, his effective duet with Bella to open Act Two was probably the highlight of the production. Act Two is a vast improvement on Act One if only because there's very little dialogue in it. (The main characters don't feature at all--how's that for sustaining dramatic tension? It calls to mind the MST3K refrain "Meanwhile, in another movie...") The midsection is a suite of dances representing nature in three seasons, which I enjoyed so much that I contemplated staying until the end after all--and then came another injection of painfully pseudo-profound sophomoric verse and we were outta there.
I was at least relieved to find out that it premiered in 1955, since it made it easier to accept the revolting sexual politics. Lyrically, the aforementioned duet is like a no-irony version of "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors, but it makes sense to have such thoroughly 50s sentiments in a work that's...well, actually from the 50s. Of course, to understand is not to forgive, but if he'd stopped there, I could've dealt. Instead, he follows up with a musical Maybelline commercial as Bella tells Jack in detail how precisely she applies cosmetics to reveal the "real" her. (This is after she's fled in girly-girl horror at seeing a poor little bird about to be killed by a raptor and had to be comforted by her big strong hunk of blue-collar manhood.)
Overall, it's the most rampantly heterosexual opera I think I've ever seen--far more het than Billy Budd is gay, if you can believe that. The underlying ("overlying", I should say, given the complete lack of finesse with which it is continually hammered) theme is the interaction of the female principle (which is, of course, more spiritual and moral) with the male (which is all rutting and bestial). You could say it's just Tippett being a product of his time, but what makes it so much harder to take than the blatant sexism of a 19th-century verismo opera is the way in which he tries to present the mores of a specific place and time as the natural expression of ancient and eternal biological truths.
I made a desperate attempt to stay interested by substituting in my head a libretto drawn from the works of H.P. Lovecraft (making the mysterious "Ancients" the horrifying Old Ones and adding a disturbing threat of "alienage" to the whole matter of marriage), but it didn't pan out. Yet I'm still looking forward to other contemporary operas. We've have had good luck overall and we're starting to get an idea what works. All the successful ones have been adaptations, and plays or movies (Mourning Becomes Electra, A Wedding) make for much better source material than novels (The Great Gatsby, Candide). Even the conceit of taking place within a dream can be employed successfully, as Un re in ascolta proved some years ago. One simply has to make the dream events matter by tying them to real-life developments.
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Damn, I was looking forward to this opera. Oh well, at least I'll be able to see
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You could well have a better experience than I did simply by adjusting your expectations. It'll probably be as hard for you to ignore the text as it was for me, but try. Or maybe you could turn it into a game of "Spot the Golden Bough Reference" or something that would make it all less painful.
I know I would've been better off if I'd known the opera was such a product of its time and that time was 1955. This mindset certainly makes it easier for me to deal with the sexual politics of, say, mid-19th century Italian operas. In fact, don't even think of it as going to an opera at all. You're going to see a masque; there will be singing and dancing, fancy dress and pretty lights, but nothing resembling a drama.
Still, seeing
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I am not an opera expert or anything, but I thought all operas have silly plots and that you're not supposed to pay attention to the plot and just listen to the music.
I need to go to a show at The Lyric. I live right by there.
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I stayed for Act III....
(Anonymous) 2005-12-20 02:08 pm (UTC)(link)You have it nailed on this one. I agree entirely. Also, it's refreshing to see that someone else besides myself appreciated "Un re in ascolta!"
Beautiful review!!!!
P.S. A change in username might get you some much-deserved wider distribution. I don't mind, so I'll look for more; but based on a random sample of 1 review, you're the best critic going in this town.