Attended the Met's live HD broadcast of Robert Lepage's La Damnation de Faust at my local movie theater today. (For the uninitiated, La Damnation de Faust is a "dramatic legend" of some more than two hours length that has essentially all the necessities of an opera, however it was not written to be staged, but to be presented in concert form. Personally, I'll bet this was due to Berlioz' difficulties in getting his own works staged in Paris, having been a self-proclaimed and boorish enemy to the Parisian musical establishment from the beginning, rather than being the outcome he truly wished for such a work from the time Goethe first bewitched him.)
First of all, let me say that attending the opera in America invariably creeps me out. I don't think of myself as exceptionally young so finding myself the youngest person at any entertainment event is sure to produce the willies. The theater was nearly full and I can safely say I was the only person there under thirty (what am I saying? I was the only person there under 45).
This production was fantastic. Robert Lepage's much-hyped use of interactive projections was stunning and lived up to the buzz. The set was a wall containing multiple levels of shallow platforms, on to which were projected images from the front and the rear. Images of underwater dancers, fibers that moved in response to the motion of the live dancers (as far as I can tell, detected by sensors that felt their body heat) and real-time images of the singers were all effectively deployed without technology overwhelming the drama or music. One of the most striking projected images was in the scene that begins with Faust singing "Nature immense," the pillars of the set were shown to be the trunks of trees whose waving green branches were projected onto a screen above the top platform. As Mephistopheles entered and moved across the stage he touched each pillar, whose branches subsequently withered. Another excellent excellent effect was during the soldiers' song "Jam nox stella velamina pandit," young women sat at the base of each column as suspended soldiers walked vertically to the top of the set where they fell limp and were slowly lowered to the women's laps to be passionately mourned and then repeat. The novelty and beauty of the director's vision was a great addition to this spare drama.
Which brings us to the work itself. La Damnation de Faust is one of Berlioz' greatest works, which is to say it is a work everyone feels obliged to call a masterpiece, but no one genuinely feels to be such. In it we encounter Berlioz' flair for sonic ingenuity and boldness of gesture, his literary instinct as well as his stunted, inorganic and distinctly French conceptualization of his wild, whirling vision. Here, as much as in any of his works, Berlioz is unable to break from the dance, which both enchants and bores the listener. Luckily, this last aspect was well-exploited in this production with excellent choreography. Indeed, the half-formed nature of this work contributed brilliantly to this bold production, such a non-opera is a director's opera waiting to happen. (Also there is no cadre of die-hard traditionalist fans who would howl at the liberties.)
Musically, it was superb. (Need I say it was better than the first time I saw it under Keith Lockhart in Salt Lake in 2004?) Levine and the orchestra were fine, and the chorus was expressive and disciplined. Susan Graham as Marguerite was refined and sensitive. Marcello Giordani as Faust was uneven, but acquitted himself very well in his upper register, and his performance improved as the show went on and he warmed up. It goes without saying that John Relyea as the villain-who-will-not-be-named stole the show, his charismatic physicality detracting not one whit from his musical art. His costume, a red leather suit with black fur growing from the arms and a two-feather'd cap, was hideous, but he looked fabulous in it.
Regarding the broadcast, the amplification was poorly coordinated at times, particularly in choral passages, obscuring the chorus' careful artistry. Also the camerawork was occasionaly bizarre, showing closeups where it should have shown wide shots to allow us to take in the carefully choreographed spectacle. I've appreciated seeing productions recently (this and Dr. Atomic) that use the stage's full vertical space.
Lastly, Hector Berlioz, I speak to you who are beyond the grave. In denying Faust salvation or even an intecessory prayer on his behalf, you have not done a disservice to a great piece of literature, but to the very fabric our civilization. You have denied us hope, and in case you haven't been watching the news lately, hope is very hot right now.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Listening to Beethoven
What bugs me in Viennese classicism is the occasional treatment of different voices as if they are equal, the trading of musical material between the low and high voices of the string choir with no variation, reflecting the contrapuntal norms of a past era rather than the realities of orchestral performance. Listening to the scherzo of the 9th today when tutti join fortissimo in the galloping rhythm I heard it as if the lazy articulations of the bass were indeed intended by the composer to resonate slightly behind the higher voices, that the strings, written in rhythmic unison, cannot at that tempo sound rhythmically unified. I thought this represents a breakthrough of using the instruments for what they are capable of rather than as the modern replacements of the human voices sounding in churches, and this is here an irony because the passage is in rhythmic unison but that is not what the listener hears: the upper voices sharply articulate the downbeat, but the lower voices are a powerful grumbling like an earthquake whose rhythmic ambiguity undermines the tyranny of the downbeat.
This is a case of what I find brilliant in Beethoven and it is usually misunderstood: that he used the conventions of his time to contrive gestures of shocking violence and intensity. I don’t believe the opening of the Eroica or the 5th or other such famous moments are truly so unprecedented in the music of his time. I’m thinking of the sforzandi in the finale of the 4th, which come in the midst of an unremarkable flurry of superficial activity. On the page the music does not appear so different from Haydn or Mozart and yet it grated on the eighteenth century ear. In that gesture from the 4th I hear more than in any other (except perhaps the first harmony of the finale of the 9th) Beethoven in his apartment mercilessly pounding, punishing the piano he can hardly hear, less to summon the sound than to vent his despair. It’s not that I think Beethoven’s gestures weren’t shocking in his time, they clearly were, but they generally had some precedent and were always the building blocks within a classical framework, sharp articulations of masculine violence to be balanced with female grace.
I noticed the strong hissing of the “f” in “Freude,” which was particularly pronounced in the recording I was listening to, as the choir sang all consonants well before the beat, which I found distasteful at first but am now uncertain about. I remember a voice teacher I knew taught that consonants should be before the beat in German and English and on the beat in French and Italian.
I thought today also that Beethoven did not have the words or their sounds in mind when he wrote the finale, with the single exception of the word “Freude,” which I imagine seized his mind forcefully upon reading the poem and that the lightning-bolt choral “Freude” at the end of the recitative emerges from that moment of inspiration when Beethoven first encountered this bit of Schiller. Otherwise the finale is instrumental music for singers. (Rather like how most of Brahms is piano music for whatever instrument) This is an indicator of how far the orchestra had come as musical thing-in-itself: composers now no longer imposed vocal tropes on wood and steel (I mean sheepgut), but the limitations and conventions of instrumental music now set the terms for vocal writing. This ideal would see its apotheosis in Wagner and his disciples—Wagner, brass-obsessed, innovating new uses and abuses and extensions of the brass choir, whose vocal lines never seem to stray from what’s possible for the French horn. Of course the same goes for Mahler and Strauss, but Strauss is cheating because for him the French horn can do anything.
The Turkishness in the finale of the 9th always troubled me. I do not doubt it was intended to be sonically strange, but I realized for the first time that poetically it represents if not a return to the home of youth, then the new elysial home we dream of, a sort of Garden of Eden. While Turkishness was at the center of the 18th-century Europe image of otherness (as, indeed, the Ottoman empire and various other parts of dar al-Islam were the parts of the outside world with which Europe was most intimately familiar), there was a strand of Enlightenment thought that presented Turks or other easterners as embodying the West’s spiritual ideals and the whole of the East as untouched by the failings of the West. Naturally these images occur side-by-side with portraits of Eastern greed, violence, lechery and superstition, as in die Entführung aus dem Serail, but if we laugh at Osmin, we, with the chorus, sing the praises of the benevolent and enlightened Eastern prince Pasha Selim, who comes off looking much better than the Europeans (at least the men), and whose deus ex machina pardon shows he understands Enlightenment ideals better than they. Voltaire, having taken his simple Candide on a tour of European locales, lifestyles and ideas, settles the hero in his own modest Eden in European Turkey (notably not in the Americas, Europeans’ other fantasy garden, which proved too dangerous for Candide and Cunegonde). I suppose Nathan der Wise is one of the best examples of Western virtue in the person of the crusader suffering by comparison to Eastern temperance. While it could be argued that Nathan represents the cosmopolitan middle ground between the excesses of East and West, yet Nathan, as a Jew, was definitely not European, and would not have been considered such by audiences of Lessing’s time. These fantasies are an emblem of Western decline as European civilization begins to look outward for inspiration rather than inward, as also witnessed also by the European fascination with the New World. These images are also intended as a criticism and mirror of the West rather than having any true grounding in experience or contact with the east.
Back to Beethoven. I would have a hard time arguing that the Turkish march in the finale is not “other.” Poetically, however, it draws the European listener out of his time and place to a distant land he’s never visited and can hardly imagine yet is real, a place where “all men will be brothers.” This ideal place, though located in the inscrutable East is merely the Enlightenment projection of Elysium.
I find myself listening to the 9th and wondering how it is Beethoven was able to summarize the aspirations and anxieties of an entire civilization. Inevitably I doubt the assumptions of those ponderings, asking whether these meanings are what we have bestowed on the man’s work. I consider the strangeness of the apotheosis of Western ideals in this journey through sonic mystery, angular gestures and rustic simplicity, arriving at the place where our most carefully considered dreams come true (by way of the Sublime Porte, no less). It’s a bizarre trip, and one I love to take.
Hat tip to Maynard Solomon for the last three paragraphs
This is a case of what I find brilliant in Beethoven and it is usually misunderstood: that he used the conventions of his time to contrive gestures of shocking violence and intensity. I don’t believe the opening of the Eroica or the 5th or other such famous moments are truly so unprecedented in the music of his time. I’m thinking of the sforzandi in the finale of the 4th, which come in the midst of an unremarkable flurry of superficial activity. On the page the music does not appear so different from Haydn or Mozart and yet it grated on the eighteenth century ear. In that gesture from the 4th I hear more than in any other (except perhaps the first harmony of the finale of the 9th) Beethoven in his apartment mercilessly pounding, punishing the piano he can hardly hear, less to summon the sound than to vent his despair. It’s not that I think Beethoven’s gestures weren’t shocking in his time, they clearly were, but they generally had some precedent and were always the building blocks within a classical framework, sharp articulations of masculine violence to be balanced with female grace.
I noticed the strong hissing of the “f” in “Freude,” which was particularly pronounced in the recording I was listening to, as the choir sang all consonants well before the beat, which I found distasteful at first but am now uncertain about. I remember a voice teacher I knew taught that consonants should be before the beat in German and English and on the beat in French and Italian.
I thought today also that Beethoven did not have the words or their sounds in mind when he wrote the finale, with the single exception of the word “Freude,” which I imagine seized his mind forcefully upon reading the poem and that the lightning-bolt choral “Freude” at the end of the recitative emerges from that moment of inspiration when Beethoven first encountered this bit of Schiller. Otherwise the finale is instrumental music for singers. (Rather like how most of Brahms is piano music for whatever instrument) This is an indicator of how far the orchestra had come as musical thing-in-itself: composers now no longer imposed vocal tropes on wood and steel (I mean sheepgut), but the limitations and conventions of instrumental music now set the terms for vocal writing. This ideal would see its apotheosis in Wagner and his disciples—Wagner, brass-obsessed, innovating new uses and abuses and extensions of the brass choir, whose vocal lines never seem to stray from what’s possible for the French horn. Of course the same goes for Mahler and Strauss, but Strauss is cheating because for him the French horn can do anything.
The Turkishness in the finale of the 9th always troubled me. I do not doubt it was intended to be sonically strange, but I realized for the first time that poetically it represents if not a return to the home of youth, then the new elysial home we dream of, a sort of Garden of Eden. While Turkishness was at the center of the 18th-century Europe image of otherness (as, indeed, the Ottoman empire and various other parts of dar al-Islam were the parts of the outside world with which Europe was most intimately familiar), there was a strand of Enlightenment thought that presented Turks or other easterners as embodying the West’s spiritual ideals and the whole of the East as untouched by the failings of the West. Naturally these images occur side-by-side with portraits of Eastern greed, violence, lechery and superstition, as in die Entführung aus dem Serail, but if we laugh at Osmin, we, with the chorus, sing the praises of the benevolent and enlightened Eastern prince Pasha Selim, who comes off looking much better than the Europeans (at least the men), and whose deus ex machina pardon shows he understands Enlightenment ideals better than they. Voltaire, having taken his simple Candide on a tour of European locales, lifestyles and ideas, settles the hero in his own modest Eden in European Turkey (notably not in the Americas, Europeans’ other fantasy garden, which proved too dangerous for Candide and Cunegonde). I suppose Nathan der Wise is one of the best examples of Western virtue in the person of the crusader suffering by comparison to Eastern temperance. While it could be argued that Nathan represents the cosmopolitan middle ground between the excesses of East and West, yet Nathan, as a Jew, was definitely not European, and would not have been considered such by audiences of Lessing’s time. These fantasies are an emblem of Western decline as European civilization begins to look outward for inspiration rather than inward, as also witnessed also by the European fascination with the New World. These images are also intended as a criticism and mirror of the West rather than having any true grounding in experience or contact with the east.
Back to Beethoven. I would have a hard time arguing that the Turkish march in the finale is not “other.” Poetically, however, it draws the European listener out of his time and place to a distant land he’s never visited and can hardly imagine yet is real, a place where “all men will be brothers.” This ideal place, though located in the inscrutable East is merely the Enlightenment projection of Elysium.
I find myself listening to the 9th and wondering how it is Beethoven was able to summarize the aspirations and anxieties of an entire civilization. Inevitably I doubt the assumptions of those ponderings, asking whether these meanings are what we have bestowed on the man’s work. I consider the strangeness of the apotheosis of Western ideals in this journey through sonic mystery, angular gestures and rustic simplicity, arriving at the place where our most carefully considered dreams come true (by way of the Sublime Porte, no less). It’s a bizarre trip, and one I love to take.
Hat tip to Maynard Solomon for the last three paragraphs
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