Musings on love and freedom in the Ring Cycle

Wagner's Ring Cycle is about a curse on a ring, but in another (even larger) sense it's about a curse on women. Four women in the four operas are forced to marry and submit to a man against their will.

The first we encounter is Freia, who is Wotan's sister-in-law. Wotan contracts with two giants to build Valhalla, and he agrees that if he is unable to pay he will give them Freia. He never had a way to pay them, so when they demand their money he gives them Freia (to the horror of Freia and her siblings) - but then discovers that the gods will lose their immortality without her, so he steals the Rhine gold to give the giants instead.

In the next opera we encounter Siegmund, who is pursued after trying to free a woman who is being forced into marriage by her brothers. Siegmund seeks refuge in a house, only to discover that his twin sister Sieglinde lives there - they were separated years before when bandits abducted her and forced her into marriage with the cruel Hunding.

Next up is Brunnhilde herself. Daughter of the earth goddess Erda and the sky god Wotan, she is the head of the warrior clan the Walkures. A virgin goddess, no mortal man can meet her gaze and live. But she disobeys Wotan and in punishment he turns her into a mortal, leaving her helpless on a mountain to become the slave of the first man who finds her. She thinks she has broken the curse by convincing Wotan to surround her sleeping form with fire so that only the greatest hero will be able to win her - and that plan seems to work until her hero, Siegfried, is drugged and duped into forcing her to marry another man.

Other characters suffer minor versions of the this sexual predation. Fricka is humiliated by her philandering husband Wotan. Erda is duped by Wotan into giving up wisdom, and after bearing Brunnhilde for him she loses much of her power. (Even one male character, Siegfried, is given a drug that makes him forget his wife Brunnhilde and think he loves Gutrune. But you have to feel that Siegfried is partly to blame: why did he leave Brunnhilde so soon after finding her? Why did he trust his hosts so stupidly?)

There is nothing subtle about Wagner's theme that women are not free in love - the repetition and drama smash us over the head with it. In a piece of art that is so preoccupied with the idea of love, this is a heavy undercurrent of darkness and cynicism.

(Love is not all rosy in other ways, either. Alberich is able to steal the Rhine gold only after he renounces love - but he does that after some pretty cruel taunting. The two great romances in the cycle are both incestuous: Siegmund with his twin sister Sieglinde, and Brunnhilde with her nephew Siegfried. There is much passionate love-making, but all of it is creepy.)

Erda, the earth goddess, has a relationship with Wotan off-stage, between the first and second operas. All we know is that he wooed her to obtain her wisdom, and then Brunhilde was born. Erda goes into a steady decline after that, sleeping almost all the time. When Wotan cut a branch of the World Ash tree to use as his staff of power, the tree slowly withered and died; the same seems to happen to Erda: this appears to be a zero-sum game, where power gained by one player causes another to lose it.

The only married female character who is not in an unwanted sexual relationship is Fricka, Wotan's wife. Fricka is the goddess of marriage and her major motivation in the text is to find ways to keep her husband from dallying with other women. (She is not successful.)

There are other female characters in the Ring Cycle. The Walkures are virgin goddesses, depicted as proud and free (although they exist to serve Wotan by collecting heroes who die in battle to serve in Wotan's army). The Norns, daughters of Erda, don't appear to have lives outside of their job of untangling the ropes of fate. The Rhine maidens, mermaids who guard the Rhine gold, are definitely sexual beings, but it is not clear that they do more than flirt. Finally there is Gutrune, spinster, who drugs Siegfried to make him love her, but her actions are manipulated by Hagen, who is scheming to get the ring.

Hail, Isolde

After Richard Wagner had been working on the Ring Cycle for about ten years, he took a break for two years to write Tristan und Isolde. With Tristan, he did something that seems unbelievable: he took the plot of his unfinished magnum opus (the libretto of the Ring Cycle was finished, but it would take him 15 more years to complete the music) and he ripped it off.

What he repeated was the love story between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. In both operas, the man is a great hero, and the woman is equally heroic: Brunnhilde the goddess warrior queen, Isolde the Irish healer princess. Both women are proud and regal, with high status. Yet in both stories the hero gives the woman to another man, with the result that the woman is humiliated and brought to the brink of sexual subjugation. In both stories, a love potion deprives the hero of free will. In both stories, the hero is slain and the woman chooses to follow him in death.

In the Ring Cycle Wagner wrote a libretto that is the equal of the best of Shakespeare, and it is an enormous, complicated epic. Tristan und Isolde is the opposite: a splendid opera, but despite its length it is a very simple story. It has just two of themes, and they are hammered home with a heavy hand. Those themes are light/day (worldly ambition, falsity) and night (sex, death, the womb). The two extremes suggest (but don't quite admit to having) religious overtones.

In a libretto that is barely 10,000 words (in the English translation), there is a heavy repetition of the day/night themes. “Day” appears 63 times; for example, envious day, importunate daylight, spiteful day, the noonday sun of worldly fame, slave of day, day’s false glare, day’s deceiving light, spiteful day, the lies of daylight honour and fame, day’s empty fancies, lying day, phantoms of day, accursed day, night casts me back to day so that the sun can forever feast its sight upon my suffering.

Henry V (review)

A pivotal moment in Shakespeare's Henry V is when Henry tells his army to kill their prisoners.

Shakespeare has taken Henry through a long epic of personal change. In Henry IV Part I, Prince Hal is a dissipate, fun-loving, rich man's son, feeling guilty about the bad deeds his father performed to get the crown. Over the three plays Hal changes a lot. As he assumes the responsibility of becoming king his transformation is so great that he initiates a war to obtain French land. But the chillingest thing he does is during the battle of Agincourt when Henry decides to kill the French prisoners - a gross violation of any rules of war or morality.

Many productions of Henry V leave out the killing of the prisoners. Branagh and Olivier both left it out, and you have to assume that they didn't want their regal portrayals of Henry to be tarnished by such brutality. It's a pity. It changes everything to leave it out.

Des McAnuff's current Stratford production of Henry V leaves in the killing of the prisoners but makes no sense of it. The production is enjoyable fluff, but it makes little sense of anything. The biggest problem is the casting of Aaron Krohn as Henry; Krohn may be a decent actor, but he's more a matinee idol than a Shakespearian: he doesn't have the gravitas or the technique for Henry.

The second biggest problem is what McAnuff has told Krohn to do. It's like Krohn is just creating scenes without any context. After Henry's ruthlessness with the prisoners, McAnuff has Henry become a lighthearted lover who inexplicably falls in love with the French princess - there's no hint that the alliance solidifies his hold on France - that Henry's transformation is now so complete that even love is for him nothing but politics.

Henry V is full of stirring moments and great lines, but this production lets them all slip away. Henry's stirring pep talk to his troops becomes a conversation with a few of his generals. "Once more into the breach... the game's afoot!" is lost in monotone. Henry has no character and the play ultimately has no meaning.

Stratford doesn't fail the way it used to. Even in this remarkably vapid production, there is much that is good and the play overall is enjoyable, with great staging, music, sets - and a huge talented cast.

###

Snooks

"Snooks" is cool-guy lingo for "sonic dematerializer," a "next-gen weapon" that provides the premise (such as it is) for the recent film The Losers. The Losers is based on graphic novels by Andy Diggle, but as far as I can tell the slang "snooks" is wholly an invention of the film.

According to the movie, snooks are the weapon of choice of modern-day bad guys because they are environmentally friendly. The film's arch-villain, played by Jason Patric, says they "produce no pollution - they're pure destruction" and so are highly sought-after by eco-terrorists. When asked about other next-gen weapons, Patric airily asks, "Have you heard of deep-space tachyons? Singularity events? No?" and he arches an eyebrow to let us know that if we don't have the science, there's no point trying to explain.

Me, I'm so old school that when you put "graphic novel" and "sonic dematerializer" together I think of Madame Castiofore, the glass-shattering opera singer in Tintin. On its own, "sonic dematerializer" makes me think of that gizmo that dental hygenists use if you forget to floss. I seem to recall in the 1960s series The Prisoner that Number Six was kept in The Village by means of a sonic weapon of some sort - they make for excellent low-budget special effects because all you have to do is shake the camera a little, have the actors grab their ears, and then have something vanish. In fact, the mad scientist in Help! tries to get Ringo's ring off with a sonic dematerializer, causing his pants to fall down and fuses to blow. (When the fuse blows John Lennon says, "My god! What's your electricity bill like?" and the scientist's assistant, Algernon, says, "Well it's sort of a long counterfoil...")

All in all, the destructive power of sound seems pretty last-gen to me (maybe even retro-gen). But I like this word snooks. Snooks even sounds like a good nickname for the old prima donna.

The idea that the next generation of terrorists is going to require environmentally friendly bombs is just, well, delightful. It's a great shame that the movie was so dumbed-down that they made no attempt to explain how the arch-villain would wield a singularity event as a weapon, not to mention how he'd harness the elusive tachyon. All we see of the snook is an island that gets obliterated, and you think you could do that for less than $1 billion cash.

By the way, The Losers is a really bad film with really good acting by everyone in it. It's a great shame that so much talent wasted nearly a year creating such a bag of crap. I saw it only because I thought there would be superheroes.

###

Lipsynch (review)

One of my favorite scenes in Robert Lepage's nine-hour play Lipsynch occurs at the end of the first act. The young man Jeremy has fought with his adoptive mother and is in a plane flying off to make a new life for himself. We see him lighted in a window of the plane, clouds scudding behind it. It's startling when his adoptive mother (an opera singer) appears outside the still-airborne plane, singing a beautiful piece from Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and even grippier when his dead birth mother climbs on top of the plane and begins walking above him. Lepage manages to put the audience completely in Jeremy's head and give us his feelings of longing, love and sadness for his two mothers.

A lot of skill was required to make that scene work - to make us able for a moment to accept we were at 40,000 feet watching Jeremy through his little oval window; make us able to morph into being inside Jeremy's head. The plane set had been introduced much earlier and played with: we first saw the inside; then it became an airport bus. This is a pattern in the play: in each act there is one piece of set that is changed in a fluid, transformative way that made the sets central to the production rather than just a prop.

I don't need every theatrical production I attend to provide a new interpretation or employ new narrative techniques. But when something as startlingly innovative as Lipsynch comes along, it's an enormous rush.

I know Lepage through his direction of opera (Bluebeard's Castle, Erwartung, The Damnation of Faust), where he uses dazzling high-tech tricks to add emotional wallop to the production. From seeing his operas, I expected zowie special effects. But Lipsynch isn't like that at all. It uses a lot of new effects, but I wasn't immediately aware of many of them as special effects.

For example - All the dialog was miked, but the sound system was good so you didn't really realize it was miked. The importance of the miking was that the actors could talk quietly - naturally - so there was none of the staginess of a typical live play. I don't have any problem with staginess, but the naturalness (you might even say TVishness) created a totally different theater experience, and very interesting.

Another example of an effective but understated effect: When Lupe, who at 15 was forced into the prostitution, appears in a scanty costume, she stands before a bank of fluorescent light bulbs, making it painful to look at her: a really good way to ensure that a story about exploitation is not itself exploitative.

Lipsynch is simply a new type of play. The intimacy of the quiet, understated dialog is part of it. The structure is another: there isn't the usual narrative arc, but nine separate portraits of characters whose connections aren't always immediately apparent. The play was written by the actors, and it is self-consciously a collaborative effort, showing a plethora of visions. I had the sense that everything I saw or heard was deliberate and important, but there was no single crux to it all. The main themes are communication and artifice. For part of the play, the two themes are used to produce a sort of autocommentary: theater exposing the mechanics of theater. It is also about all the different ways that humans communicate and the things about communication that hold them back. It is also about sexual abuse and exploitation.

The structure of the plot concerns two women who were abused and exploited. Lupe starts and ends the play and all the other characters radiate out from her, but the other story of sexual exploitation is in some ways even more central (and seems to be the story that created the title).

The play uses a real recording done in a BBC studio of a woman named Sarah who was interviewed about being a prostitute, and the actors lipsynch the lines. While Lupe was unable to express herself because of language and age barriers, Sarah is extremeley eloquent but eerily detached and clinical, as if she is unable to feel what has happened to her. The BBC interviewer sounds totally unsympathetic, as if she was asking about a shopping excursion rather than childhood abuse and a life of horror on the streets. Later in the plot, the way Sarah is treated is brutal but nonchalant. We never even find out how her story winds up (just as noone knows what happened to the voice in the interview): our society doesn't treat female sex workers as our equals.

Sarah is the character who sticks with me the most. While narratively she's a side story, memorializing her experience seemed to me to be the central import of the play. It was after I saw the play that I learned that Sarah's lines were lipsynched and that we had heard her real voice. The production had playfully tricked us on a few occasions, making us think we were seeing one thing and then showing us it was really something else. The lipsynched scene was like a scarlet letter, an exposed but unseen nugget of real, raw humanity.

The play has some goofy moments (very enjoyable), and I think such moments are virtually a requirement of a long piece of theater. When I saw Kenneth Branagh with his Renaissance Theater group doing Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V all in one day, his direction called for some pretty outrageous stunts by Henry V to wake us up and keep us alert. Branagh had the invasion of France done by WWII-era tanks and a huge banner that said "Fuck the French!", along with bright, loud explosions. Lepage has a dead man farting and a few other jokes, but it accomplishes the same thing. The nine hours were an enjoyable, sometimes intense, sometimes funny odyssey.

Note: This play has been a work in progress for a couple of years. The production I saw was at the Toronto 2009 Luminato Festival.

###

The White Hotel (Review)

I first read DM Thomas’s novel The White Hotel when it was published in the early 80s. I loved it but found it extremely disturbing. It ranked in my mind with Deliverance, 1984 and Jude the Obscure as books that had upset me so much I could never read them a second time.

This week, after 27 years, I read it again. My second reading was profoundly different from the first. It was still rewarding and disturbing. I cried pretty steadily for the last hour of reading and a while after. But the world has changed so much in 27 years that it’s a different book.

The White Hotel (don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens) is about several things, but is based in Freud’s article Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he posits that humans are motivated by the life instinct (creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation) and the death instinct (destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction) – by sex and death.

In the novel, the historical Freud is helping a young woman who has debilitating pain that doctors think is psychosomatic. As part of her treatment she writes Freud a poem, followed by a narrative explaining the events in the poem, in which she describes a passionate tryst she has in a hotel in the Alps (which she calls the White Hotel) with a man she identifies as Freud’s son. She has never met Freud’s son. In this fantasy, while the lovers have sex other guests are killed in all sorts of horrific ways. Bodies fall outside their window.

The poem is meant to be shocking: it’s obscene, erotic, sometimes gross, and jarringly personal in the way she keeps referring to her lover as “your son”. When I read the book in 1981, the sex section at the beginning of the story balanced the shocking death scene at the end. However, in the intervening 27 years our measure of what is sexually shocking has changed markedly. Now the sex can’t provide that ballast, and the brutal violence at the end of the book doesn’t fit as well – it might almost, to a first-time reader, feel a little tacked-on.

The story could be read as a novelization (and hence sort of proof) of Freud’s theory of sex and death as the two great motivating forces. It's also a repudiation of Freud, as in the story Freud has let the young woman read his papers, and then she creates a fantasy (or a free association) that perfectly proves his theory. But also, in the novel the character Freud believes in clairvoyance, by which he means the ability to read minds and see into the future. (I don’t know if the real Freud believed this, but he probably did, given Thomas's scholarship.) Given that Freud believes that, all his explanations for his patients’ problems are turned on their heads, because he was treating mainly young Jewish women 30 years before the Holocaust, which would profoundly affect all of them: if they had any clairvoyance at all, it surely would explain their hysteria.

At the end of the story our heroine is killed, along with thousands of others, by German troops at Babi Yar. Thomas was criticized for lifting some of the description of the massacre directly from the text of a survivor (although he credits him on the copyright page), but I thought it was appropriate. Certain things are so horrific that they shouldn’t be fictionalized. Thomas’ handling of this portion of the book is extraordinarily sensitive.

The book has a coda in which all the characters (Jewish or not) are in heaven, which takes the form of Palestine. I don’t see how the book could exist without this coda. It’s like Thomas is taking the reader by the hand and leading us to the end of the experience, helping us cope, reminding us that although many died, life continued.

In one sense, things feel a little over-explained in the book: explanations are a bit too pat. I think Thomas was trying to write for a wide audience that wouldn’t necessarily be able to fill in gaps. But I also feel after my second reading that I need to read it many more times. I don’t understand the purpose of the various perspectives (different narrators and the disturbing second case in “your son”) or the reason the plot unfolds as it does, or why our heroine spends so much time on trains.

Not that you need to understand any of the mechanics of the novel to feel the emotional impact. In an ironic twist, the book leaves me thinking about Freud’s rival Jung. The novel has added to our collective unconscious this image of a large, stately hotel in the mountains, a place we might unexpectedly find ourselves while on a journey somewhere else. If it hadn’t been for the coda I might have thought of the White Hotel as heaven, but instead I see it as our inner life (maybe the id). The lulling sound and motion of a train might hypnotize us into a visit to the White Hotel, deep in our psyche, where every character is an aspect of ourselves and events show us – well, that’s the mystery.

###

Salome (review)

The Metropolitan Opera's production of Salome, shown in cinemas under the Met HD program, had - for the most part - great singing and orchestration. And yet it didn't work. It failed on casting, lighting, direction, costumes, set design and above all, film direction. The result was a performance that lacked emotional punch. And emotional punch is what Salome is all about.

The story goes like this: Princess Salome lives in Judea at the time of Christ. Her mother the Queen is a famous decadent. Her mother's current husband, Salome's stepfather, lusts after Salome. One night during a party Salome wanders outside and discovers the pit where the prophet John the Baptist is being held a prisoner. She has him brought up and falls in love with him, but he is repelled by her. She has him returned to his pit. Salome's stepfather comes by and asks Salome to do an erotic dance for him. She says she will, but only if he swears to give her anything she asks. He agrees, and she strips for him. She then demands the head of John the Baptist. Horrified, he finally has to agree, and the last 20 minutes of the opera is Salome with the severed head - she kisses it, sings to it, and generally descends into full-blown madness, until her stepfather orders her killed.

Dramatically, the opera has two major scenes: Salome's dance and Salome's time with the head. They take about the same amount of time. Both leave the audience uneasy. It's creepy to watch a daughter dance erotically for her father, and watching an opera singer get naked seems voyeuristic and inappropriate. At the same time, the dance and the music of the dance is beautiful. The combination of attraction and repellence create a dissonance in the watcher and before we recover from it, we're hit with the gross, shocking appearance of the severed head and are then drawn into a long, insane scene of Salome with the head. It's brilliant emotional manipulation. The opera is one act and barely an hour and a half long, but it's a draining experience to sit through.

Or it should be. In this year's Met production, Salome is played by Karita Mattila, who is pushing 50 and looks like an older, heavier version of Nurse Ratched. In addition, Juha Uusitalo, who plays John the Baptist, is very fat; when Salome sang "I love your body" people around me laughed nervously as if they weren't sure if it was a joke. Salome's white dress emphasized the thickness of Mattila's waist and there was something wrong with the halter top: she kept trying to adjust it while she was singing. The camera work was relentlessly close-up, emphasizing every flaw and negating any poignancy that the set might have provided. The lighting had one setting (bright) and gave the production a cheapo, made-for-TV quality.

The striptease was just plain awful. Any choreography in it was reminiscent of a really low class strip club, and Matilla did two lap dances during it. It made me wince, and I don't think that's the reaction that composer Richard Strauss was looking for.

The set wasn't all bad, but it didn't make any sense. It looked like a 1970s disco with a glass floor and spiral staircases, but the libretto makes it clear they're supposed to be outside the palace ("Let's go inside" and "The wind is chill" and so on).

Mattila and Uusitalo have wonderful voices. The Salome role has a huge range and Mattila was perfection moving from soaring romantic vocals to harsh ugly sounds and avante garde bleakness. Uusitalo was especially effective when singing in the pit, and the echoy, off-stage effect worked surprisingly well in the cinema.

The reason I felt compelled to write about this performance (since I only review about one in fifty operas I see) is that the badness of the production helped clarify for me what a successful production would do. Salome needs to develop from vulnerable to damaged to beyond repair. The events in the opera unfold in real time, so we need to see how someone could lose their mind in an hour and a half. In the beginning the young girl is teetering between the decadent power of her parents and the innocent goodness that causes her to love a holy man. Stripping for her stepfather breaks something in Salome, but her essential goodness causes her descent to decadence to drive her mad.

This opera, like most operas, is all about scoring emotional hits - it's visceral, archetypal. The opera deals with innocence vs experience and spiritual longing vs forbidden lust. It raises the possibility of redemption: in the middle of a decadent party, Salome stumbles on a man of great holiness. It's about breaking taboos: along with incest, the most shocking aspect of the opera is that Christ's prophet is murdered. (Even Salome's stepfather is horrified by that.)

All the aspects of the production must work together so that the music and story and visuals all move the audience to understand something about human possibility and the range of our own souls. Done properly, we will all feel that we are Salome, losing our innocence but, in a way, finding redemption in being unable to remain sane without our natural goodness. Like all great tragic opera, Salome should be a cathartic experience.

The casting of an older woman as Salome was a disaster not because Matilla couldn't appear believable as an object of lust, but because she couldn't bring us, the audience, into the journey from innocence to depravity.

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.

###

Hail, Tristan

On the boat to England to marry the king, the Irish princess Isolde describes the English knight Tristan as "the hero who killed my beloved and sent me his head in a box."

I love that line.

This being Wagner's version of the tale, it gets weirder. We learn that when Tristan killed Isolde's fiance he was mortally wounded himself and was taken to her to be healed. She saved his life but then demanded revenge. She held his sword to his breast, but she couldn't go through with it.

Tristan is heir to the king of Cornwall, a childless old widower who does not want to remarry. After he killed her lover, Tristan convinced the king to marry Isolde. (This would almost surely lead to his disinheritance when Isolde bore a son, and would be hell for Isolde, so it was both an attempt at atonement - giving his power to her children - and an act of mutual destruction.)

As Tristan takes Isolde to England to marry the king, she is wearing around her neck the fragment of his sword that she found embedded in her lover's severed head. Her mother sent along a love potion to help ease the horror of marrying the old man. For the same purpose, Isolde brought poison.

The atmosphere on the boat is pretty hostile. Isolde demands that Tristan let her kill him. He gives her his sword and bares his breast but again she can't bring herself to do it. She takes her maid aside and tells her to fill a cup with poison, and she asks Tristan to drink a toast to peace. Tristan understands that the cup contains poison. They both drink.

But the maid switched the poison for love potion, so instead of mutual suicide they fall into a grand passion.

Almost immediately after the potion is drunk the maid wails, "You chose a swift painless death but I gave you a shameful and painful one." They're not listening. In the second act they sing love songs. In the third act they die.

I recount the plot of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because it so perfectly captures why I love opera. It's the iconic nature of the stories that resonate in the universal unconscious, mixed with soul-melting music for an emotional double whammy. The effect is heightened when shared in the dark with a couple of thousand people.

How can a suicide pact between enemies lead to tragic love? Or turn that around: how can it not? There is a connection between hate and love that's difficult to pin down, which perhaps is why Wagner takes five hours to describe it to us.

###

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.

###

Brokeback Mountain (an interpretive essay)

There's a certain sad quality to brown paper bags. When we first see Ennis Del Mar at the start of the film Brokeback Mountain, he carries all his worldly possessions in a tattered brown paper bag. Near the end of the film he is given another paper bag to carry two shirts - all he has left of the one great love of his life.

Ennis changes substantially in the 20 years between those two brown paper bags. When the film opens in 1963 Ennis is so badly damaged that he is like someone who has suffered abuse. Losing his parents young, forced to quit school, raised by elder siblings who abandon him as they get married, and conflicted about his sexual identity, he is so beaten down - so devoid of spark - that he walks in a slow shuffle with his head bent way forward, round shouldered. He can barely meet another person's eye and doesn't talk except to answer a question. Although he is only 19 years old his forehead is scrunched in a perpetual frown and his eyes are wary.

But Ennis is a powerful character: smart, intuitive and purposeful, with a great capacity for love. The choices he makes throughout his life require terrible compromises and preclude his having any kind of social or financial security, but he finds a safe path for himself and the man he loves in a world that's treacherous for them.

As the story opens the two teenagers Jack and Ennis meet while applying for a summer job. The foreman who sends them up the mountain to herd sheep for the summer decides that Jack (who is more experienced with sheep) should be the herder and Ennis the camp tender, so in effect, as they start their summer Jack plays the role of husband and Ennis the role of wife. Jack acts a bit like a parody of a husband. He barks, "No more beans!" as he's heading off to work one morning, and when Ennis is late for supper one day, Jack gripes, "Where the hell you been? I've been up with the sheep all day hungry as hell!"

Ennis repositions their roles in a manner that better suits each of them: at Ennis's suggestion they switch and Jack takes the wife role. (In the short story the film is based on, their sexual relationship begins the night after they switch roles; in the film, it's a bit later.) Jack had already started to treat Ennis with maternal affection: he dabs a wound, shows concern for Ennis's childhood privation, praises his skill at shooting, and plays the clown to cheer him up.

One night Jack shares his whiskey with Ennis and Ennis speaks freely for the first time - perhaps the first time in his life. Jack says, "Friend, that's more than you've said in two weeks" and Ennis replies, "Hell, that's the most I spoke in a year." Ennis's expression after he says that tells it all: he tries to smile, but can't, and instead looks a little wistful and a little ashamed; he has admitted a deep secret about his damaged, lonely life.

The first time they make love (the night after brief, drunken coupling), Jack pulls Ennis's head to his breast and kisses his hair before rolling on top of him. The brief scene is heart-wrenchingly tender and also wonderfully erotic, and that's all we get to see of their love affair that summer. It's frustrating for the audience to have such a powerful, delightful love story revert to other plot lines, just as the relationship is fleeting and frustrating for Ennis and Jack.

When the summer ends and they part, it's not clear why Jack waits four years before he contacts Ennis. Ennis has no idea where Jack is and so is unable to contact him. He believes that Jack is angry because Ennis sucker-punched him just before they parted. But while Ennis has little hope that he will ever see Jack again, he seems to have done some thinking about how they can be together if Jack ever does get in touch.

When Ennis's wife Alma shows Ennis the postcard that arrives unexpectedly from Jack, she asks if Jack worked with Ennis. Without missing a beat Ennis lies, "Nope, Jack he rodeos mostly. We was fishin' buddies." He then prepares a series of other lies. He has a story concocted to explain Jack's unsociable behavior: "He's from Texas." He tells her they may stay up drinking and talking all night. When Jack arrives Ennis has foreseen Alma's delaying tactic of asking him to bring back cigarettes, and has some ready for her.

The connection between the two men is epic. In the short story, Annie Proulx describes their first meeting after four years like this: "They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying son of a bitch, son of a bitch; then, and as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together... pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, "Little darlin." [Jack's] shaking hand grazed Ennis's hand, electrical current snapped between them. ...From the vibration of the floorboard on which they both stood Ennis could feel how hard Jack was shaking."

The night of their reunion, lying together in a motel bed, Jack tells Ennis that he red-lined it all the way to their meeting and asks if Ennis missed him. Ennis is unable to do more than mumble incoherently but he presses his thumb to his eye (a gesture he makes only when he is extremely emotional and trying to explain himself); the expression that flies across his face, unseen by Jack, is part embarrassed grimace and part wry smile: it exposes the depth of his feelings over those four years.

The next day Ennis tells Jack his plan for how they can be together: fishing or hunting trips, deep in the backwoods, on an infrequent basis. Ennis must have planned it long before he lied to Alma about being fishing buddies, and Ennis's plan (unlike Jack's plans) is workable. It is a compromise designed to meet his family obligations and allow him to be with Jack, but it's a sad compromise: it means that he and Jack can never spend enough time together, and it requires (as we learn much later) that he work casual jobs that he can quit to spend time with Jack, so he is never able to adequately support his family.

Eventually Ennis and Alma agree mutually to give up on their marriage. Ennis is stoic while his divorce decree is read until the judge says that he must pay $125 a month child support for each child until they turn 18. Then Ennis's eyes well with tears: he realizes that there is no freedom for him in divorce. He has written a note to Jack telling him of the divorce and Jack makes the 14 hour drive to see him, hoping that they can finally start their life together, but Ennis pretends it is all a mistake and sends him away. At a subsequent meeting he tells Jack that the child support obligation means he can't just quit jobs anymore - getting together is even more difficult than when he was married.

Ennis is stoic about everything in his hard life except losing Jack. The two times he faces the prospect of losing Jack he is so affected that he literally falls to his knees. The first time, when Jack drives off after their summer together, Ennis collapses in an alley with dry heaves and uncontrollable crying. During their last moments together, when Jack says "I wish I knew how to quit you," Ennis's knees buckle and he falls in anguish, trying alternately to beat Jack away and cling to him.

The healing of Ennis is a function of his sexual awakening. At the start of the film he has a fiancee he has apparently barely spoken to (given that he says he hasn’t spoken hardly at all in the last year); later, when a waitress picks him up, we see how he might have drifted into that relationship. Before he met Jack, it seems that Ennis must have lived in a state of cognitive dissonance over his sexuality that made him utterly incapable of dealing with people on a social level. That dissonance never fully goes away.

Scarred as a child by seeing a lynched homosexual, Ennis can't admit to himself that he's gay. In their final meeting he blames Jack for his condition: "Why don't you just let me be. It's because of you, Jack, that I'm like this. I'm nuthin. I'm nowhere." But Ennis is wrong about himself. We are shown the great erotic charge between the two men, Ennis's lack of interest in his wife and girlfriend, and Ennis's physical breakdowns at the prospect of losing Jack. In the short story Ennis tells Jack that during the four years they were apart "I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy," but adds, "except I sure wrang it out a hundred times thinkin about you."

If Jack is the sexual initiator in their relationship, Ennis is the orchestrator: when Jack was supposed to go sleep with the sheep, he always did; it is Ennis who neglects his duty and stays at the camp, precipitating their first encounter. When Jack goes to Ennis after four years, it is Ennis who first pushes Jack up against the wall to kiss him. It is Ennis who has planned how they can carry on their affair. And it is Ennis who, as Jack describes it, keeps Jack on a "short fuckin' leash."

In describing their characters, director Ang Lee told Jake Gyllenhaal that Jack and Ennis are water and milk. By this I think he meant that Jack is clear and Ennis is opaque. Jack is comfortable in his sexual orientation. He is optimistic. He's upfront about his feelings and openly affectionate. Ennis is the opposite: unreadable. For 20 years he didn't tell Jack that he had to quit his jobs to make time to see him; nor did he let him see, until their very last meeting, the power of his feelings.

Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. ...Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see or feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be."

After their final week together (we learn later), Jack drives to his parents' ranch and tells them that he is going to leave his wife and move to the ranch with a friend from Texas, just as he used to tell them that Ennis would move there with him. Jack has tried but been unable to tell Ennis about his new boyfriend. It seems to be a result of that relationship that Jack's sexuality is exposed in Texas and he is murdered.

Jack's death occurs just as Ennis is freed of his family obligations. In the final scene of the film Ennis is living in a trailer in a secluded spot. His beloved daughter, now 19, has come to tell Ennis that she is getting married (and as with Ennis's brother and sister, marriage is effectively abandonment). Since his other daughter was born directly after the first, we realize that both children are 18 and so Ennis owes no more child support. Ennis is finally free to be with Jack, but Jack is dead.

Ennis is grieving Jack at the end of the movie, but his spirit is no longer broken. He even takes some pride of ownership in his little, underfurnished trailer, putting numbers on his mail box and stepping back to appreciate how they look. In his grief he builds a sort-of shrine to Jack in his closet, made of the two shirts that he carried away from Jack's parents' house, and when he adjusts the shirts and the postcard of Brokeback Mountain that he has hung there, he says, "Jack, I swear." In the short story, Proulx intends this to mean that Ennis is perhaps finally ready to make a commitment to Jack. She writes, "Jack, I swear-" he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.


The short story by E. Annie Proulx was published in the October 13, 1997 New Yorker and is available in the "Complete New Yorker" DVD set as well as in book form.

###

Are you sleeping, Hagen my son?

I'm a big fan of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and if I had to pick one moment in the 17-hour, four opera marathon to call my favorite, it would be the weird, creepy conversation between Alberich and his son Hagen in the final opera, Gotterdammerung.

Alberich (a powerful dwarf from deep in the earth) and Wotan (the chief of the Norse gods) are in a multi-generational battle to obtain the Ring of the Nibelung and gain ultimate power. They have both sired off-spring to unwittingly act as their agents. Alberich's son is Hagen, and one night while Hagen is sleeping Alberich creeps up to him to give him instructions. Hagen is not in a natural sleep. He answers Alberich, and in his sleep he promises to steal the ring for his father. Several times during the conversation Alberich asks, "Are you sleeping, Hagen my son?" (Schlafst du, Hagen mein Sohn?)

The father-son conversation (with beautiful bass/baritone singing) has a languorous, almost lullabye aspect, except that the father is making his unconscious son swear to do monstrous acts. (Lack of free will is a recurring theme in Wagner, and in this case Alberich can beat Wotan because Alberich has the free will to make his son the tool of his bidding, while Wotan is constrained to let his offspring act freely.)

In the Ring Cycle, Wotan's agent (his grandson Siegfried) is powerful because he is fearless. But Alberich's agent, his son Hagen, is powerful because of his hatred. In the end hatred beats fearlessness, but hatred also kills itself. Hagen literally stabs Siegfried in the back, but the result is that the ring is lost to Alberich forever. in addition Valhalla burns and there are no gods left to replace it, so the next era of history begins.

I was thinking of all this while reading James Benjamin over at Left End of the Dial v2.0; he has written a series of posts about Dolchstosslegende as practiced by supporters of the Bush government. The Dolchstosslegende propaganda technique was used in Germany during its two world wars and deliberately references the legends Wagner based the Ring Cycle on. It blames failure in war on a populace that is insufficiently patriotic: it implies that the government, like the hero Siegfried, has been stabbed in the back by factions that questioned government policies for their own ends.

I think we're all aware that Dolchstosslegende has been a big part of the Bush spin about the US invasion of Iraq. There has been nothing subtle about it. (Benjamin's posts are still well worth reading.) The Bush government feels that it has been stabbed in the back by Democrats who have questioned its policies. It alleges that the troops have been stabbed in the back by anti-war protestors. Debate is reduced to the unproductive question: Who is a patriot and who is a traitor?

Dolchstosslegende propaganda can only reference the legends Wagner based his tale on, and not the Ring Cycle itself, because Wagner (for whom the term "moral ambiguity" was coined) paints a much less black-and-white picture of the back-stabbers and the back-stabbed. None of that directly applies to the Bush use of the propaganda technique... except in that Bush is unwittingly referencing the end of World War 2 and the new world that never would have emerged without it, and similarly is referencing the result of the fall of Valhalla - the rise of humanity. The Wagnerian conclusion may be that our only hope is the fall of Superpower-America and the beginning of the next era.

###