Viennese Operetta Gets Some New York Glitter

Die Fledermaus

Johann Strauss, Jr.

Metropolitan Opera

December 4, 2015

Die Fledermaus is nothing but festive fun.
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

Lui: That holiday feeling is now officially upon us. There is nothing that says seasonal cheer like Die Fledermaus. Bursting with catchy waltzes and bubbling over with champagne, Johann Strauss, Jr.’s scintillating operetta really can’t help but put you in a good mood. The air is redolent with the sweet festive fragrance of schnapps. I never thought I would be as fond of this crowd-pleaser as I immediately became upon our first encounter. 

Prince Orlofsky cordially invites.
Photo credit; Metropolitan Opera

Lei: Last year we fell in love with this Viennese operetta when we saw it performed by indie company NY Opera Exchange, that opted for a hybrid approach of having the dialogues translated in English and leaving all songs in the original German. I thought that was the perfect balance of respecting the musicality of the original and making the dialogue-dense operetta more approachable. And so, softening up my purism about respecting the original, I got to the Met’s production with a relatively open mind, notwithstanding the fact that critics pretty much crucified the show when it opened back in 2013.

Time keeps ticking, ticking away.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: Having heard such dismissive remarks about the English adaptation of the original German libretto, especially when it comes to the extended dialogue passages, I was ready to be irked. But instead many of the jokes were actually funny and the lighthearted laughter was infectious. Truly contagious. Only a few of the comedic interludes drug on a bit too long. But even then, just when you thought it had gone on too long, a zinger of a line grabbed you and you’re back into it. Laughing and letting go.

Dressed for jail, Eisenstein bids his wife farewell.
Photo credit: Marty Sohl

Lei: The revised libretto was modernized and Americanized, with puns galore (“Breakfast Epiphanies”) and some truly hilarious lines. Think of Alfred the tenor who, when accused of doing only “Second rate productions of third rate operas,” retorts: “But hey I just got booked for a Death of Klinghoffer in Kuala Lumpur.” A particularly laden joke, since the lead here sung in the Met’s controversial revival not too awfully long ago. Or else, when the jailer Frosch, looking into the first rows of the orchestra, says, “You know what’s it like to work for a living. [beat.] no actually maybe you down here don’t. But you up there.” Gesturing to the peanut gallery. Yes, none of that was in the original German libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Genee but boy I laughed hard, probably way more than if I had to listen to German recitatif and read a translation on the little screen. 

Frosch cracking eggs like jokes.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

When it came to the lyrics though, the English translations just did not work for me. Sung English is just not as musical and does not work as well with the score as the original. Also, the translation was often choppy in an effort to force the rhyme and resulted in a way less fluid result than if it had been sung in German. While it is true that operettas are closer to musicals than grand opera, Jeremy Sams’ production turned Die Fledermaus into something that sounded way too much like a Broadway musical for my operatic taste.

The dashing Prince Orlofsky.
Photo credit: Marty Sohl

Lui: The cast was top notch. During the last run, I remember reading that the role of Count Orlofsky was sung initially by a countertenor which apparently added to the irksomeness of the English bastardization. This time mezzo soprano Susan Graham sang the role and she was much more palatable displaying not only great vocal power but also incredible acting chops. Pretty amazing to see her shift from the tragic role of the lesbian countess in Berg’s Lulu a few weeks ago to the extravagant Russian royal with such comedic ease. 

The Bat drinks to the sweet taste of his revenge.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot was a jovial Dr. Falke, aka Die Fledermaus, and displayed his usual charismatic stage presence and strong vocal expressivity. Tenor Toby Spence as Eisenstein moved well on stage and shined vocally, particularly in his duets and trios with other characters. Actor Christopher Fitzgerald was hilarious as Frosch the jailer. Even when you started to think he was taking it a little over the top for standard operatic taste especially at this venue, he went and turned things ridiculous and had you laughing. If you didn’t like tonight’s Frosch you have problems: living, laughing, letting go, loving.

Rosalinde carries the show.
Photo credit: Marty Sohl

Lei: Soprano Susanna Phillips as Rosalinde carried the show. More than everybody else on stage she displayed terrific comic timing while also delivering some delicious musical numbers. Particularly memorable were her rendition of the “Hungarian Countess” aria and her many trios with other male characters. Soprano Mireille Asselin stepped in at the last minute as Adele, replacing Lucy Crowe and shining brightly in the show stopping arias of the coquettish maid turned actress. Dimitri Pittas as Alfred, Rosalinde’s ex-lover, was full voiced and hilariously ardent in the stereotype of the Italian tenor, sadly the revisions to the libretto took out most of his cameos of blockbuster Italian arias (which I find super funny in the original ‘Maus).

New York gets a little dose of Viennese glitz.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Lui: Jeremy Sams’ production with sets and costumes designed by Robert Jones is both simple and opulently elegant all the same time. Like few recent productions at the Met, this one really seems to have struck the right balance. Its minimalism is used to create maximalist effects. Certain aspects are all effervescent glitz and fin de siècle glamour, like the elaborate gold leaf inverted dome at Prince Orlofsky’s ballroom and the Eisenstein’s abode, others, like the jail and the make-shift promenade-the-garden space, duly set the scene with just a few scenographic brush strokes. An excellent model on which to build. The orchestra under James Levine waltzed through Strauss’s ear candy score with grace and poise. So many catchy tunes. So many greatest hits.

The Vienna of Klimt looms large over the Eisenstein abode.
Photo credit: Marty Sohl

Lei: All in all a night of great fun at the opera. A tad on the musical-theater end of the spectrum but the score is so pleasant, the production so spectacular, the cast so hilarious and the dancing so delicious that I could not help but give in, enjoy the fun, dance in my seat and hum Die Fledermaus’ tunes on my way home.

- Lui & Lei

Alfred puts the moves on his old flame.
Photo credit: Marty Sohl

Ida shines in the spotlight.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Rosalinde on the verge of renewing her vows.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

A troupe of Hungarian dancers completes Rosie's farce.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Omar's Brainwashing (and the Death of Klinghoffer)

The Death of Klinghoffer

John Coolidge Adams

Met Opera

November 1, 2014

Photo credit: Met

“The Brainwashing of Omar” is what John Coolidge Adams’ controversial opera could have been called, at least in Tom Morris’ production of it. Omar, the youngest and most impressionable of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1984, is the glue between the first and second act. The Klinghoffers aren’t even introduced until act two. Played by the dancer Jesse Kovarsky, Omar provides not only the continuity, but he also occupies the center of the dramatic tension. His initially reluctant journey toward terrorist training and violence is recounted over a series of intensely choreographed dance interludes that are interspersed throughout the opera, which amount to many of the most exhilarating passages in the piece. He is also the glue between the sequence of three scenes in which the opera reaches its climax that this production stages so elegantly. The build up to the murder takes us from Omar approaching poor Leon Klinghoffer in his wheelchair from behind. Then we cut to an ecstatic chorus in which, according to the synopsis, “Omar remembers the day he was inspired to die for his beliefs.” 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

In the next scene, our perspective has suddenly shifted, a move unprecedented in most staged entertainment. We get a cinematic reverse shot. Klinghoffer is now facing us and so Omar’s approach is now toward the audience. As theater, it was an utterly unique sequence. And bang, just like that, the deed is done. Klinghoffer dies right before us.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

And so the eponymous victim of the story is not even necessarily the star of the show. The captain has the most vocal airtime and Tom Morris and his choreographer Arthur Pita privilege Omar’s trajectory through the event. But what is really striking about this opera is its ensemble cast structure. Like a Robert Altman film, before the Klinghoffers are even introduced, the international reality of the many passengers who remained on board the cruise ship during the hijacking is brought to the fore. There are several non-sequitur moments as the tensions heighten in Act I, like the Austrian woman who locked herself in her room during the whole fiasco and managed to survive on the fruit basket that happened to be in her room and the chocolates she bought as a souvenir at a previous port of call in Greece. We also get the story of a Swiss grandmother who is almost caught in the crossfire with her frightened grandson in the dining room when the terrorists first strike. Rather than focus on just one perspective, we are given a multiplicity of perspectives on the action.

Photo credit: Met

This kind of narrative experimentation is not necessarily unique in opera. One of the great things about classic operas is that you will often find multiple characters all singing their feelings, all at the same time, in multi-layered harmonies. Such experimentation is made possible in this piece by the fact that many passages of the opera are told in flashback, which to me simply does not work in opera. If a character steps up and simply declaims a long-winded story to the audience without acting it out in real time much of the emotional impact is lost. What the operatic stage demands is an immediacy of emotion and action. If you distance the music from the action, the emotions will inevitably suffer. Only by putting the singing into context are the emotions most effectively heightened.

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

So, the opera does several things that are unique to the art form. One is the fragmentary way in which the story is told. But fragmenting the story through these multiple perspectives only helps to thematize the fact that Leon Klinghoffer was killed not because he was Jewish, but because he was American. In the opera, as it seems to have been even in reality, the fact that the victim was Jewish only seems to come up tangentially, if at all. He was singled out with the Americans, Brits and Israelis because of the nationality on his passport. It was pure chance that he just also happened to be Jewish. That was beside the point for this rag-tag group of terrorists that is portrayed as little more than a gang of amateurs who kind of botch the whole thing, even though they apparently get off scot-free eventually in the end as supertitles told us after the opera as we filed out of the house at the end of the show.

Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich / New York Times

(What was with the terrorists disembarking and smiling and waving goodbye to their captives like they were saying goodbye to a group of old friends? Is this a commentary on how most of them got away with little or no punishment? As the supertitles at the end of the opera remind us?)

Photo credit: Met

The music is, nevertheless, extremely beautiful throughout, and conductor David Robertson did an excellent job in leading the Met Orchestra through a score that, for a number of reasons, is not performed very often. But still, you just can’t have people singing certain things. In the captain’s opening monologue, poor Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot has to sing awkwardly phrased abstractions like “comprehensive solitude.” What does that even mean and do people even talk like that, and if not why should they sing such multi-syllabled nonsense? I began to wonder if it wasn’t a slightly fumbled translation of something from the captain’s diary like “solitudine completa” or something to that effect, since he is after all Italian and the libretto was supposed to be based at least in part on the historical record.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

With the score as beautiful as it so often is, I began to wonder why librettist Alice Goodman and even the composer in his setting of the text both insisted on going out their way to give the singers such ugly and awkward lines to sing. Is it that this is a symptom of modernity? Do we have late Verdi and Wagner to thank for giving us the gift of the sung-through opera score? Now it would seem that nobody on stage can dare open their mouth and have a something poetic to say or a melody to sing, let alone a rhetorical flourish. Instead they struggle to put two words together that even an ordinary person would speak. This was the case with last year’s Two Boys. In Klinghoffer, however, even if one of the characters does rise to the occasion and is given the musical wings to break out into poetic flights of song, the poetry somehow gets bogged down. Why is it that Mamoud’s famous bird aria (here delivered with a slight tingle of beauty by bass-baritone Aubrey Allicock) devolves into a long list of bird species? “The eagle, the falcon, / The crow, and the raven, / The sparrow, the wren, / The dove, the pigeon, / The stork, and the heron, / Alike being clean / In the sight of Heaven.” Who talks like this? Where is the poetry in such taxonomic flights of fancy? And what about Mrs. Klinghoffer prattling on about modern medicine and joints and artificial limbs? It was just weird and felt like such tangential discussions were included out of bad taste.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

With all the polemic surrounding this event, one would expect the opera to delve a little deeper into the trenches. Instead much of the opera is really quite dull. Some of the captain’s loquacity is pretty useless, a bit like the distracting bits with the detective and her mother in Two Boys. I guess the ditzy British dancer serves her function as the offensive western philistine, who is pretty clueless and has none of the convictions that the terrorists or even Mr. and Mrs. Klinghoffer have, but that’s about it. She adds only minor irritation to the opera, which is a shame because at its heart are in fact human concerns of the highest order, no matter how quotidian and banal they might be expressed. There is certainly a subtle critique of the West in the mix. 

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton

And there is something to be said for the fact that the most intense, exciting and easily the most thrilling music is found in the choruses of the angry Palestinian exiles and in the solo by a Palestinian woman (mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani) who seems to represent Omar’s alter ego in the climactic “Desert Chorus.” The opening and closing numbers of Act One are easily the most exhilarating moments in the whole piece. Otherwise, this is one of those modern operas with virtually no arias worth of such name that left me desperately craving for melody. One would expect that at least the character of Leon Klinghoffer would express some sort of tragic tension through voice but we were not so lucky: baritone Alan Opie mostly angrily declaimed his lines in an operatic voice with no real musicality to it, not even when he was about to die.

Photo credit: Dylan Martinez

Photo credit: Met

Nevertheless, the opera concludes on a somber and, for once, lyrical note and the last word is given to mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the mourning Mrs. Klinghoffer who is distraught but also full of regret because they didn’t pick her. She hints the fact that she herself is already afflicted with the fatal illness that would take her life just a short time later, and her husband, though wheelchair bound, nevertheless always managed against all odds to keep a great attitude about life. She was the one who should have died she says. Because this way he would not have died in vain. Because the world did not take note and his death did not make the world sit up and notice what was going on since it really elicited so little attention from the international community. She sings:

“If a hundred / People were murdered / And their blood / Flowed in the wake / Of this ship like / Oil, only then / Would the world intervene. / They should have killed me. / I wanted to die.”

Only if more people had been killed would anybody bother to notice, she sings at the end. Ultimately, this is the gift that the opera gives. It is a monument to one of the many innocent and virtually forgotten victims of a conflict that continues to rage on leaving countless unidentified and publicly unmemorialized victims like Leon Klighoffers in its wake. This is the story of one whose name will indelibly remain.

- Lui & Lei

 

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met

Photo credit: Met

Photo credit: Met

A Nose on the Run!

Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met – October 8, 2013

All photo/image credits: Met

Lui: Originally written between 1835 and 1836, Nikolai Gogol's short story The Nose is an absurdist whodunit fantasia, part bureaucratic thriller, part social satire, set in the same St. Petersburg as Pushkin's 1833 Eugene Onegin. Scouring the streets of the imperial Russian capital in search of his missing nose, Gogol's noseless protagonist Kovalyov could very well have crossed paths with Pushkin's cast of aristocratic characters, if it weren't for their difference in class. For, Kovalyov is hyper-aware of the hierarchies of Petersburg society.

William Kentridge's signature 2010 Met production of Shostakovich's 1930 operatic adaptation moves the action of the story to the St. Petersburg of the Soviet futurists in the early twentieth century. His staging features a profusion of paroliberismo, animation and live action video projected onto mobile set pieces, scrims, screens and curtains. The stage at the Met is a whirling frenzy of activity for virtually all of the swift hour and forty-five minutes of the modernist composer's fleet-footed score.

Lei: The terrific music was definitely the main character for me. The Met orchestra sounded more alive and electrified than ever under Gergiev’s lead, rendering Shostakovich’s score a pure and super-kinetic delight. I was so taken with the orchestra that I would have been content just with the music and Kentridge’s dada-futurist animations. These projections worked very well with the musical tempo and served both as part of the set and as narrative tool. The sequences where the human-size nose goes out and about, engaging in all sort of activities (from running and ballet dancing to typing and horseback riding) were just hilarious and conveyed perfectly the absurdity of the plot.

Lui: I tend to feel the same way. I could watch Kentridge's imagination riff on this material for a long time. It is so incredibly pleasurable. Still, the man at the center of the show is collegiate assessor Kovalyov (but you can call him "Major"), who is dramatically aware that the mysterious and absurd loss of his nose will doom his much desired escalation of the social ladder. In his adventures with and without his olfactory organ, Kovalyov measures himself up to everyone he encounters. He constantly scrutinizes the buttons on their uniforms, their noses, even their whiskers. When it turns out that his nose is on the loose and has somehow sprouted legs of its own and become as big as a man with a higher title than his, Kovalyov is suddenly unsure of how to address his superior. Perplexed before his nose – now State Councilor! – the Major comically struggles to convince it to resize and go back to where it belongs, on Kovalyov's face.

Lei: This production chose to display the confrontation between Kovalyov and his Nose as an exchange between two men, with a wobbly shadow of a nose projected onto the wall behind the higher ranked character. Rather, this should have been a confrontation between a man and his absurd overgrown nose. To me, this directorial choice missed the point entirely, especially since the big papier-mâché nose was always so effective throughout the rest of the opera. This is after all one of the key moments in the story that brings Kovalyov's complex to the fore. In the context of his bureaucratic and social insecurities, if he's talking to his nose we want to see a big nose, not a little man who sounds gracious, all too soft spoken and elegant. Also, tenor Alexander Lewis was not a convincing Nose, since he sounded too delicately high-pitched to the point of almost coming across as melancholic. I found this rendering to be at complete odds with the Nose’s character – a snob and brisk State Councilor who does not want to have anything to do with the lower-ranked Kovalyov.

 

Lui: Once his nose slips through his clutches, our dutiful civil servant then humorously weighs his bureaucratic options for seeking assistance in his plight – whether to file an appeal with the Board of Discipline, where the Nose now works, to take an ad out in the local newspaper or turn to the police. We are immersed in the world of protocol and arcane hierarchies. It is a satire of the corrupt inefficiencies of the bureaucratic chain of command, and it's outrageously surreal.

Lei: The staging conveys very vividly the dwarfing of man by the bureaucratic and social machine. In all the interior scenes (such as the barber shop, Kovalyov's apartment and the newspaper office) the action takes place in shoebox-like sets that occupy only a very small portion of the stage. The rest of the space is filled with projections of magnified newspaper articles and fast clips bursting with of all sorts of social choral situations, from crowds marching to clerks typing and audiences watching phantom shows of their own, with a terrific set-within-the-set effect.

Lui: It's rare to find an opera that so fully represents the social sphere in all its dynamic, overlapping layers. Shostakovich's score is bristling with frenetic energy and Kentridge brought it all to life. He gives us the crowds in the square, in the cathedral, in the park, at the newspaper office and in the police headquarters. Even poor Kovalyov's modest apartment is seething with social life as it is where scenes unfold with everyone from his live-in lackey, to the police commissioner, to a doctor living in the building who bursts in to make a house call. There is no privacy for our poor civil servant.

Another scene that really worked for me was the duet between Kovalyov and the mother of his some time love interest. The Major blames her for the loss of his nose and accuses her of witchcraft. The mother disregards the absurdity of the nonsensical accusation and reiterates the offer of her daughter's hand in marriage, should he still be so inclined. They exchange correspondence and sing the contents of their respective letters, one superimposed directly onto the other. Rather than achieving communicative clarity, the effect is a confusing hodgepodge of two people talking at and over one another. It is a piece of virtuosic genius the solution the composer comes up with to represent the social economy of their epistolary-marital commerce. Rather than give us the direct courting of the love interest through a seductive aria or a lovey-dovey duet, Shostakovich gives us a pushy mediator and turns the pseudo-love story into yet another negotiation straight from the sphere of the social.

Lei: The opera has lot of Russian recitatif, which was often quite funny given the absurdity of the story and the wittiness of the libretto; also, the subtitles were projected onto the set, sometimes even as part of the animations, which made the business of following the Russian fun and easy. Even so, after a while all the talking got a bit tiresome and I just craved some melody.

When it came to real singing, baritone Paulo Szot did a good job as Major Kovalyov, sounding powerful enough and displaying the comic vein required of the role. I also liked the musicality of Sergey Skorokhodov as the Major’s servant Ivan, who provided a rare moment of palpable emotion when he cozied up with a balalaika singing a simple folk ditty, showing the musical eclecticism of the visionary breadth of this opera. Barbara Dever as Mme. Podtochina and Ying Fang as her daughter brought some (at least for me) much-needed female melody to the piece, it was a relief to hear some soprano trilling after the prevailing manly Russian declamations. I was not particularly impressed by the rest of the singers, who many times were just so dwarfed by the music that it was just hard to hear them.

Lui: As one of the most experimental stagings that I've seen at the Met, it made me nostalgic for the kinds of cutting-edge productions NYC Opera has brought is over the last couple of years. Seeing The Nose made more poignant the imminent loss of the institution that brought us, for example, that visionary Moses in Egypt last year that won't soon be forgotten. Along with Satyagraha, The Nose ranks up there with the most unique operatic spectacles that I have experienced at the Met.

Lei: I am not sure The Nose it’s my piece of operatic cake, however I enjoyed it as an entertaining absurd futurist piece. And I very much look forward to seeing more Kentridge-like productions around.