Sunday, March 11, 2007

a few operas, possibly of interest

When I said that opera as a living art form is in trouble, I didn't by any means mean to suggest that it's dead, or even necessarily moribund. There are a handful of operas from the last 30 years that I feel demonstrate the aesthetic potential of opera to be vital today, in that they transcend some of what I feel have been the problems with most opera of the past (more on that as we get into the discussion). The practical potential is another question, as audiences for classical music are diminishing to the point that it is extremely risky to launch the kind of massively expensive production that a full-scale opera tends to be unless it is stylistically bland enough to satisfy the typically conservative tastes of the economic core of what audience remains. There is much debate over how and whether classical music can be economically rehabilitated.

Here, then, are a few operas I wish we could all see and talk about (although that simply isn't practical). If the rest of you have other examples you think are interesting (especially if they can be seen on DVD or in current NY performance), please comment!

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Steve Reich and Beryl Korot: The Cave (1993)

This is one of the only examples I know of a truly multimedia opera, and I would put it forward as exceptionally successful both as an opera and as a multimedia work. Reich collaborated on The Cave with video artist (and wife) Beryl Korot. The video is presented in five channels on large screens above the stage, in extremely tight synchronization with the musical performance. (The conductor works from a click-track on headphones.)

Interestingly, given our discussions in this class, the work is also a documentary, about the identities (and names) of the characters Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael as seen from the traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and about the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac (and Adam and Eve!) are believed to be buried. It is divided into three acts, covering the perspectives of each of these religious traditions in turn. Just as in a typical documentary, there is video footage of interviews with people affected in various ways by the subject matter, from experts to ordinary people. Here, though, the speech of the interviewees is given Reich's trademark musical treatment of tight tracking in melodic form (something which has to be heard to be quite understood--see also, for instance, his work for string quartet and audio recording, Different Trains).

There was a very good production of The Cave in a Reich 70th-birthday series at Lincoln Center last November. You can read more about the work here and here. An excellent audio recording is available on CD, but I unfortunately know of no performance available in any video format.


Philip Glass and Robert Wilson: Einstein on the Beach (1975)

This was the first of a trilogy of operatic collaborations between Glass and director and theatrical designer Robert Wilson. Although it lacks a story as such, it is very loosely a portrait of Albert Einstein. The text is a collage of solfege syllables, poetry, and references to pop culture (the Beatles, David Cassidy) and current events (the Patty Hearst trial).

There are audio recordings of Einstein on the Beach. I have also seen video excerpts, but am having trouble finding where (please tell me if you find a source). A short video excerpt of the related opera Akhnaten (the close of the trilogy) can be seen in the documentary Philip Glass: Looking Glass (interesting in its own right). There is also a DVD of Akhnaten that is by all accounts to be avoided.


Philip Glass and Jean Cocteau:
La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast) (1995)

Glass designed his version of La Belle et la Bête as a live operatic accompaniment to the classic film by Cocteau (1946). The film is presented as though silent, with the singers singing in approximate synchronization to the onscreen speaking. It is something like watching a foreign-language film dubbed into English. The Criterion Edition DVD release of Cocteau's movie (available at Netflix) includes Glass's operatic version as an optional soundtrack.

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There are a number of other operas that I personally feel some connection to, but which I strongly suspect to be outside most tastes in our class because they are in a musically remote atonal style that most people find difficult to listen to. Examples include Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1929-1935, unfinished). Mark mentioned Arnold Schoenberg's Moses and Aron (1930-32, unfinished), which also falls into this category. (Berg was Schoenberg's pupil. Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern together constitute what is called the Second Viennese School.) A later example is Morton Feldman's Neither (1977, with words by Samuel Beckett).

Reaching earlier, it is impossible to talk about the modern development of opera without mentioning Richard Wagner, particularly his monumental four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungen (or, if you want to be cool, just "The Ring"). The Ring is of epic scale in every respect: story, size of cast and orchestra, and length--an obvious precedent in both scope and plot to J.R.R. Tolkien's and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogies. Wagner's music as a whole was pivotal in moving from the lush Romantic style of the late 19th century into the modernism of the early 20th century. It was only a short hop from a late-Romantic symphonist such as, say, Anton Bruckner to Wagner, and another short hop to Schoenberg and complete atonality. Although their operas may still seem "big" in terms of length and production scale, the stylistic minimalism of the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass can be seen as the antithesis to what may sound to our ears today as the heavy excess of Wagner.

Certain opera composed in recent years (e.g., Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking) has struck me as striving for audience acceptance by moving subtly closer to Broadway musical theater. It may well be that opera cannot survive if it disdains popular taste to the degree of, say, Neither or the Second Viennese guys, but I would prefer to see it update itself in a way that better preserves its status as a serious art, which I think the operas of Glass and Reich do.

Finally, another area in which there have been recent attempts to revitalize opera, one that I know less about, is in contemporary productions of older operatic work. New productions of old work, in opera as in the rest of theater, always must walk a fine, highly debated line between adherence to the original author's vision and the desire to give modern audiences a new experience that is relevant and accessible. As but one example that has some connection with the rest of this commentary, I'll mention Robert Wilson's productions of the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Wilson and conductor John Eliot Gardiner collaborated on productions of Orphée et Eurydice (1762) and Alceste (1776) in Paris in 1999. They are beautiful and spare to look at, and to my eye, the updated costumes and staging do not distract from the classical musical style. Both are available on DVD, both at Netflix.

1 comment:

chris said...

As a bit of trivia, it just hit me that Moses and Aron (in German, Moses und Aron) is also an instance of the (often American) tendency we discussed in class to invent new names or creative misspellings or abridgments of old names. Schoenberg had an unusual reason, though: he decided to alter "Aaron" to "Aron" because he was a triskaidekaphobe, superstitiously averse to giving his opera a title with 13 letters. So he just yanked one of the 'a's in Aaron.