Ending Wagner

At the very end of the Ring Cycle there is a brief moment when we see that the age of the gods is over and the age of humanity is beginning. It only lasts a couple of minutes but it is of vital importance to the piece - all the fighting of the gods leads to this, the making of humanity. After 17+ hours, the audience can finally exhale. The leitmotif that plays at the end makes this very clear. A production that doesn't recognize it makes a big mistake. I know - I saw one once: it was a deflating experience.

At the end of The Flying Dutchman, when the young woman Senta is shot dead, the music suddenly changes from dark and menacing to romantic and optimistic. It only lasts a moment, but that music ends the opera. It is clear that Wagner intends that Senta and the flying Dutchman are both saved by her death: he has been cursed to immortal life on the sea, and can only be saved by a woman who promises and delivers on loving him until her death. She promised him her love, and continued loving him until her death.

It is unfortunate that the COC production of The Flying Dutchman, mounted in 2000 and currently being revived at the Four Seasons Center, misses the ending - either misses it, or handles it so subtlely that the audience misses it. Senta just falls down dead, and the Dutchman walks up a staircase holding her wedding veil, but that's it.

I can see that it's difficult to do justice to these brief but monumental Wagner endings, but opera productions must.

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War and Peace (review of COC production)

Tolstoy spent six years writing the novel War and Peace, followed by ten years releasing revised editions. Prokofiev spent 12 years writing the opera based on the novel. Both the novel and the opera were shaped by political repression. Tolstoy wanted to set the novel in the 1825 Decembrist uprising against the czars, but would not have been able to publish in the Romanov era (he wrote the novel in the 1860s) and so changed the setting several times, finally settling on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early years of the 19th century. Prokofiev was commissioned to write an opera based on War and Peace by the Soviet Committee on Arts Affairs, and then he was dogged by them for 17 years to make it suit their ideological requirements. Started in 1941 - a couple of months before the German invasion of Russia - it was originally to be a patriotic call to arms. After the war the committee added other purposes: a glorification of peasants, denunciation of decadent Russian royalty, and paean to the motherland. The committee nitpicked over individual notes. They wanted less conversation and characterization, and more declamation on patriotic themes. One argument over three measures (a few seconds of music) lasted three weeks. Prokofiev initially put up a fight, but increasingly ill health and political pressure caused him to give in. It wasn't just the committee that picked at Prokofiev's masterpiece. When he tried to mount the opera the conductors who took it on required numerous modifications. Such were the presures of the Stalinist era that an unsuccessful opening could doom a career, and one conductor threatened to call in sick on opening night if certain changes weren't made. The sublimely beautiful death scene of Prince Andrei, backed by an offstage chorus providing music that evokes his feverish state, was thus almost cut because someone thought the audience would find the use of nonsense words unintentionally funny. The current COC production of War and Peace is a reprise of the recent English National Opera production, and it works. The casting of the main characters couldn't have been better. Russell Braun is the ideal Prince Andrei. His lyric baritone, sensitive phrasing and strong good looks make him an ideal doomed romantic lead. His death scene was everything that opera should be; in the language of Tolstoy's "What is Art", Braun's performance caused an "emotional infection to spontaneously occur in the listener." Elena Semenova as Natasha and Mikhail Agafonov as Pierre were also perfect. But for me, the chorus stole the show. Not in the initial epigraph - while they sang it well, that piece of music just doesn't work for me. The dissonance in the music and the overuse of percussion ends up sounding like a tinny broadcast to my ears. But after that, War and Peace has sublime choral music, especially for the men, and it couldn't have been performed more perfectly. The orchestra, under guest conductor Johannes Debus, sounded better than I've heard it since, well, Bradshaw. Here's hoping Debus will join us on a permanent basis. In case he does, here's how he pronounces his name (I attended a symposium he was at on Saturday): Yoh-HAHN-us DAY-boose. The strength of the ENO production is in the second half, which depicts war. The backdrops and costumes were so evocative in the second half that I was simultaneously on the edge of my seat and on the edge of tears. When Pierre is rescued from his French captors the Russian partisans rise from the snow banks in white capes and slit the throats of the French. I felt I was "there" in a way I seldom do in movies. It helps to have read the book, as the opera is more a montage of scenes than a reproduction of the plot. Prokofiev and librettist Mira Mendelson do a better job capturing the war part of the book than the peace (peace, in this sense, means romance). This might be explained by the limitations of reproducing a 1,400-page novel and the distortions caused by numerous rewrites, but it might also have been due to the difference in circumstances between Tolstoy and Prokofiev when each worked on their version. Tolstoy wrote the novel while living in comfort on his estate, marrying the love of his life and then raising his family. In the first years that he worked on the opera, Prokofiev was also starting a new and lasting relationship (with librettist Mira Mendelson), but they were evacuees, moving from city to city while the German invasion grew, worrying over his children who stayed behind in Moscow. ###

Pelleas et Melisande (review)

As Debussy's 1902 opera opens, a kingdom is engulfed in a long war and is suffering a famine. The king sends his grandson, Golaud, to marry the daughter of the neighboring king and so end the war. But en route Golaud gets off his ship to hunt in a forest, and trailing a boar he gets lost deep in a pathless area. He meets a lovely woman weeping by a pool. She won't say what happened to her - just that she has escaped from something awful.

We know from Maeterlinck's play Arianne and Bluebeard (on which the opera is based) that Melisande has escaped from Bluebeard - a mass murderer who let his wives live as long as they were strictly obedient, after which he slaughtered them and stored their bodies in a room in his castle. Other than that we have only tiny hints about Melisande's past. Golaud sees a golden crown in the pool and she says she has thrown it away; when he offers to retrieve it she has hysterics.

Instead of achieving his destination, marrying the princess and ending the troubles that beset his kingdom, Golaud marries Melisande. The famine continues: scenes of starving peasants appear throughout the rest of the story.

When Golaud takes Melisande home to his castle she recoils from the place. She has no specific complaints but seems to instinctively feel that it is rotten. Despite her revulsion, Melisande forms deep connections with two people in her new home: her husband's grandfather (the king), and her husband's half-brother, Pelleas. As the latter friendship deepens, Golaud can't decide if the relationship is adulterous or not. He goes back and forth between believing they are deceiving him and believing that their friendship is that of children. There is a history to his fears: he and Pelleas are half-brothers because when Golaud's father died, his mother married her husband's brother. Is history repeating itself?

As Golaud increasingly tends towards jealousy he treats Melisande with greater barbarity, forcing her to her knees and dragging her by her hair.

The enigmatic symbols in the play are largely locational: the forest, the sea and clear pools of water appear over and over, reinforcing the sense that we're in a fairy tale that is heavy with symbolism. Another recurring fairy tale symbol is Melisande's long hair.

It is strange that the recent Canadian Opera Company production of Pelleas et Melisande did not use the set for any effect but logistic functionality. The set was ugly - all beige, black and white, with an upper level that looked like a dock and a lower level that was covered in cheap-looking clear plastic sheets (resembling water, but used as dry land in the action). The music has a melancholy bleakness that could have been enhanced by colorful lighting and a beautiful set; the enigmatic qualities of the opera could have been intriguing and mysterious, but instead veered towards pointless and boring. Some audience members around me left at the interval.

Musically, the production was very good. The title roles can be sung by a tenor or baritone and a soprano or mezzo-soprano, respectively. Russell Braun, as a baritone with a high range (and one of my all-time favorite singers), is the perfect Pelleas. His interpretation was both complex and naturalistic. (It's no wonder he has sung Pelleas at Salzburg, La Scala, Glyndebourne and Hamburg.) His clothing hampered his interpretation: he didn't really work as a romantic hero until he lost the skullcap, and he was dressed too much like Golaud for those of us in the cheap seats.

Isabel Bayrakdarian is also one of my favorite singers, and she did an admirable job, but her clear pretty voice didn't add much to the role. I could imagine a mezzo singing the role, or a soprano with a darker voice - like Anna Netrebko. There were no spine-tingling moments in Bayrakdarian's performance and no air of disturbing mystery. Melisande seemed bored and unhappy, but she should have a much more fundamental, if enigmatic, role. Melisande could be a cursed woman who is plagued by rot or an evil woman who is the source of rot, but she shouldn't be an idle bystander who just drifts along as bad things happen to her.

The libretto positions the setting as a castle that rises between the forest and the sea. Golaud looks towards the forest and sees wolves. Pelleas and Melisande look towards the ocean and see the sun. The COC production ignored this completely.

The three pools in the opera are so prominent that the production couldn't ignore them, but it certainly didn't make anything of them. The first pool, in the forest, is clear enough that Golaud and Melisande can see her golden crown glinting at the bottom. The second pool, in a grotto near the sea, is again clear enough that Pelleas and Melisande can see Melisande's gold wedding ring glinting from the bottom after she carelessly drops it in. I think of those two pools as Melisande's and Pelleas's, respectively. The third pool is definitely Golaud's. It is murky and has a nauseating smell of rotting flesh. When Golaud shows Pelleas this pool it seems his intent is murderous, but he stops himself at the last moment.

Pelleas et Melisande is an opera that requires interpretation. It must probably always be ambiguous, and it could be interpreted in many ways: to show the clash of male and female principles; the barbarity that lurks hidden in some individuals; the consequences of passing up a chance at salvation. Melisande could be a temptress who bewitched both Golaud and Pelleas or a fatally damaged soul who lives but is dead inside or the last hope for national salvation; a canker or a rose. There is so much that could be done with this opera, but the COC - frustratingly - didn't even seem to try.

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From the House of the Dead (Review)

Czech composer Leos Janacek left a manuscript on his desk when he died in 1928. The opera, based on Dostoyevsky's semi-autobiographical novel about his time in a Siberian prison camp, was so weird that Janacek's students, examining it after his death, believed it to be unfinished. They "finished" it (reorchestrated it to make it more conventional and changed the ending to make it more upbeat) and the revised version was performed sporadically. Decades later some musicologists, including noted Janacekophile and maestro Charles Mackerras, decided that there had been a terrible error: Janacek had indeed completed the piece. They were able to reinstate the original opera, but it has been sparsely performed since.

Enter the Canadian Opera Company and the vision of General Director Richard Bradshaw. With the aid of set and costume designer Astrid Janson, Bradshaw started a process to mount Janacek's original version of From the House of the Dead. Bradshaw died before he could conduct the piece, so the Australian conductor Alexander Briger was hired. Briger happens to be the nephew of Mackerras and a next-generation Janacek expert.

The opera, currently being performed by the COC at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, is a short sharp shock: 90 minutes of uninterrupted power. Bradshaw told Janson that the only time he'd seen the opera he'd fallen asleep, so they, along with director Dmitri Bertman, ensured that there was no boredom in this version. The set contains three levels: a lower level of cramped cages that hold the 75 prisoners at the start of the opera; a middle level that serves as the commandant's dining hall and later the prison hospital and has ramps on which the prisoners walk in shuffling circles; and an upper level where guards watch security cameras. Janson says that after studying Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and modern prison fiction, the themes that she and Bradshaw wanted to convey were over-crowding, social hierarchies and violence, with sub-themes of substance abuse, despair, and the spark of humanity. To this end, there are no entrances or exits: all 75 members of the cast mill around on the stage throughout the opera, the effectiveness of which is heightened by this opera having no stars but many soloists, with a lot of important music for the chorus.

Janacek's orchestration is decidedly different, but always beautiful and engaging. Briger says that Janacek's favorite key is A flat minor - "a key used so seldom that many musicians don't bother to practice it". He adds, "his music is full of double flats, double sharps. He'll use D double flat not C major." Briger says that "for the orchestra, this is the hardest opera ever written." In one infamous anecdote, a conductor who tried to perform this opera was so shaken by the experience that he gave up conducting forever.

Not only is From the House of the Dead not in most musician's repertoire, but most have never heard it and they have trouble conceptualizing what it should sound like. The rhythm changes frequently in odd ways. In addition, Janacek stretches the use of instruments: according to Briger, he calls for "extremely low notes from the trombones and tuba, along with screaming high piccolos." It takes many rehearsals to get the music right. Globe & Mail reviewer Robert Everett-Green apparently found that perfection was not reached by opening night; in his review he wrote, "It must be a challenge to play all those jagged unisons, which did not always come off cleanly in an otherwise shapely performance." If that's true, the orchestra had worked out the kinks by the time I saw the opera on February 10.

The singers also face challenges with From the House of the Dead. Singers come in with brief snatches of song and disappear: it is enormously difficult for them to know when to sing, especially with 75 men jostling on the stage. (At an opera symposium on Saturday, tenor Robert Kunzli said that during a performance last week he suddenly realized that it was time for him to sing and he didn't even have time to take a breath; conductor Alexander Briger, sitting next to him, looked genuinely shocked and upset by the revelation.) For parts of this production the chorus points towards the back of the stage and takes direction from Briger via monitor. This must be difficult for all concerned, but creates a wonderful echo-y sound.

The first act is the most challenging for audiences, with a lot of clanging sounds. Janacek's orchestration conveys a sense of despair through the omission of a middle range, relying often on very high sounds played with very low sounds. The second and third acts become more accessible. You might think of Puccini or even Aaron Copland in some of the music. It's not so much that the beautiful music creates a contrast for the brutal stories being told, but that they show the humanity that exists in everyone; as one character sings, everyone has a mother. The music seems to reflect Dostoyevsky's Christian socialist utopianism and Janacek's humanism.

The history of Russian prison camps goes back to Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century. As Russia started to build an empire by expanding east into Siberia it confronted the challenge of how to populate its new territories; the solution was to send criminals and dissidents there. By the nineteenth century Russia was sending hundreds of thousands of citizens to Siberia, a practice famously continued by Stalin. Some were sent for periods of exile and some were sent to labor camps. Depending on a person's degree of influence and privilege, the experiences could be very different; for example, Stalin was sent to a harsh sentence in northern Siberia, while Lenin was sent to a relatively cushy sentence in southern Siberia, near a railway so his mother could visit and send packages, with his colleagues and fiancee nearby.

The characters in From the House of the Dead also have different experiences. The political prisoner Petrovic Gorjancikov, who enters the camp at the beginning of the opera, obviously comes from a wealthy family. Everyone else is doomed to stay in the camp forever, or nearly. They lament, Will I ever see my home again? or Will I ever see my children? with a real sense of hopelessness.

The opera ends with the release of Gorjancikov (presumably because someone bribed the commandant), and simultaneously with the release of an eagle (played in Toronto by a trained Harris hawk) that has been nursed back to health by the prisoners. That's the opera as Janacek wrote it, but I prefer the original Dostoyevsky version: the eagle still has a broken wing and so is released to certain death in the wild. It seems wrong to say Okay, off you go - sorry for the beatings and all that; and then presume that the person (and society) is not irretrievably altered by the brutality of the experience.

From the House of the Dead is not a popular opera, so I was able to upgrade my season's tickets to prime seats on the floor. Once again I was disappointed by the sound there: the mix of orchestra and voice is too much in the favor of the orchestra, drowning out some singers. In a piece like this that is mostly about the orchestra, that wasn't a big problem, but still, I think I would have preferred to see it from my usual cheap seats in Ring Three.

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