Love Is Elsewhere

Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin

Metropolitan Opera

December 17, 2016

Love is elsewhere, until it isn't.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

From the very beginning, with its in medias res amorphous opening, the uncanny score of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin throws you into a dream-like universe. Lush and atmospheric, the Finnish composer’s music suspends the listener over an indistinct watery expanse. Eschewing an overture or prelude of any kind, the first bars conjure a brine-laden formless and foggy seascape that only slowly comes into focus the way distance lies out over the ocean.

Susanna Mälkki conducted an exceedingly smooth reading of this uncanny score with the utmost polish. Interestingly, in recordings with other conductors the same score seems more flush with jolting surprises from jarring horns and more pronounced cacophony from the percussion. The mood created by Ms. Mälkki was more suggestive, more oneiric. It came off to my ear more of a dreamy Debussy dream (à la Pelleas et Melisande), with some of the quirkier Messiaen eccentricities that punctuate its aural landscape toned down and mellowed out.

Bands of light imitate the sea.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Director Robert Lepage’s luminous production provided a fitting counterpoint to the mellifluous score. Lepage and his team focused on the ineluctable and seemingly insuperable obstacles that separate us from one another in any relationship; the daunting gulf that so often divides two people and impedes connection. The staging at the Met was dominated by some two-dozen bands of light that represented the central figure of the sea in the story over which he suspended a mobile crane that could become a stairway with a platform on either end. The effect of the bands of light was hypnotic, particularly when they were made to fluctuate, rise and fall, imitating at one point the movements of a gentle yet unsettling storm at sea. But like many of this visionary director’s productions this one was kind of a one trick pony, which in this case was not entirely off base. It matched the spectral, minimalist nature of the music, and it heightened the dreaminess of certain moments in the story, especially when Rudel dreams and the idealized object of his affections (played by a dancer) materializes over the bands of light, diving through the waves in a dolphin-like fashion.

Also effective was the way the chorus was deployed. Strategically placed beneath the “water” toward the back of the stage, where they could only just barely be seen allowed them to lend their voices to the majestic and almost mystical heightening of the singers’ voices throughout the opera. It created a haunting and often imperceptible embellishment of the sound of the individual singers and an almost spiritual elevation of the emotions. Less compelling was the peek-a-boo choreographies they were made to do, poking their heads up over the “surface” of the water in certain nightmarish moments.

The chorus makes its presence known.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Based on a very brief romanticized account of the life of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, the plot of L’Amour de Loin can be summarized as follows: a prince is bored with his womanizing life and decides to devote his energies to love more deeply; a pilgrim passing by tells him about this incredibly beautiful woman who lives across the sea in enemy territory; prince gets very excited about the idea and starts singing lovely poetry about the woman as the perfect idea of love; pilgrim tells the woman about all the fuss she’s created overseas and she’s not sure how to take it; prince decides to make the trip across the sea to finally meet the object of his desire but when he gets there he dies from the hardships of sea travel; woman finally sees the love and gets all combative about the whole ordeal.

A lyric lady of love breaks through to the other side.
Photo credit: Met Opera

This is an opera composed by a woman about a man looking at a woman who in turn finally gets her voice in the act of looking back at that man. Despite the seemingly traditional underpinnings of the romantic story itself, the triangulation of these various gazes, nevertheless, packs a radical punch.

Scores of lyric ladies have appeared over the millennia in the amorous and elegiac poetic tradition from Catullus, Propertius and Ovid to the troubadours, Dante and the centuries of Petrarchists who continue to write right down to our own time. In the history of this patriarchal literary trope, rarely are the female objects of these poets’ affections ever afforded the agency of speaking for themselves, seldom are they granted a voice of their own.

If you read the libretto divorced of the score and its staging, you come away with the impression that Clémence is quick to respond to her suitor’s advances in kind. But the way the end of both Act II and Act III were staged by LePage show that something slightly deeper may going on here.

Clémence steps down from her pedestal.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The most powerful of these moments occurs at the end of Act III. Throwing a mini-conniption fit, Clémence steps down off the pedestal, on which even the director has placed her, thus breaking the illusion of the show, and stands between two of the bands of light, in the middle of the “water,” as though the make-believe were over and it was no longer “water.” She is indeed brazenly standing up and making herself heard as a living woman and not an idealization. She defiantly no longer wants to play the game of representation and fantasy anymore. If she has a say in the matter, she isn’t going to allow herself to be loved in an idealistic way by someone who has never even met her. In this take, Clémence transcends her status as passive object of desire. For a fleeting moment in the story, she’s not going to humor a distant love like this. She is a human being just like he is and thus wants a love that is human.

In the role of the lover from afar, Jaufré Rudel, was bass-baritone, Eric Owens, from whose booming imperious voice I expected more. He left me feeling a little lukewarm. Other singers that I have heard in this role have imbued the character with a slightly more irascible, angrier reaching quality that makes the desire of the poor bereft troubadour soar a little more. Owens sounded more resigned in the chesty depths of his longing, coming across as a lover who is more languidly lethargic than energetic in his desire.

The messenger scene.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Beset not only by the obstacle of the sea, the two lovers in this opera, which is set in the eleventh century against the backdrop of a holy war, are positioned on opposite sides of enemy lines. The figure of the Pilgrim, here sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, is deployed as a conduit for the lyricism of the troubadour to pass from one character to the next. The flights of poetic inspiration with which the opera opens belong to Jaufré. He sends his lyrical spirit along via the Pilgrim who has been charged with the task of embodying those inspired verses for his beloved which then in turn inspire her to embark on flights of lyric fancy of her own.

Like Sancho Panza in an analogous messenger scene in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Pilgrim rather humorously forgets most of the content of the poetic missive from Jaufré to Clémence. He manages to transmit nothing more than the gist of the message after garbling the end of the song he was sent to sing on behalf of his master. It is a light-hearted moment in an otherwise rather stolid evening at the opera. Fortunately Mumford didn’t ham it up but rather she played the humor with subtlety and tact. She pushed the ethereal sound of her instrument throughout. And equally used her mezzo to soar on amorous pinions in ways that Eric Owens’ instrument simply did not, at least the evening that we heard him. Interestingly, the Pilgrim’s arias are the only portions of the opera that sound like they belong to the era the plot is set in, with a style reminiscent of medieval madrigals.

Don't shoot the messenger
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Soprano Susanna Phillips, in the role of Clémence, was simply stunning. She embodied the tricky tempos and other idiosyncrasies of the score beautifully and she nailed all the soaring high notes that gave angelic wings to her unattainable beauty. Phillips made the show, as both the empowered woman with a say in things and the impressionable young pushover that this character’s duality encompasses. Because, of course, by the end she does indeed eventually embody the cardinal virtue suggested by her symbolic name.

The poet sets out to cross the sea.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Once Jaufré musters the wherewithal to cross the sea, the journey takes its toll on him. He arrives only to collapse at the feet of his beloved and rather anticlimactically dies in her arms. There is nothing particularly moving about this sudden and almost mechanical turn of events. Instead, the climax is saved for Clémence’s response to what she is forced to endure. Seeing that God has struck down a man so good and so sincere in his love, she lashes out in frustration at the injustice underlying God’s moral universe.

The lovers briefly meet across the chasm.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The outcome of this brief but profound long-distance romance leads her to take up another call to arms. This time Clémence turns to another “lover,” one who rather ambiguously is either God himself or the deified spirit of her lost lover. To remedy one distant love she turns to another even more impossibly distant love. Depending on how you take this spiritual turn in the story, the end of the opera either undermines or reinforces the notion that there is something about true love is always only ever elsewhere.

And this is where L’Amour de Loin, while it may be set in the middle ages, is the product of a more modern and intellectual, almost aseptic, sensibility. This is not an opera that unleashes emotions or visceral reactions of any sort. The dramatic tension is somehow there, yet it does not explode in any traditional way. There is a lot of exploration of ideas about love, but the story as told by the music never gets to your heart.

– Lui & Lei

You're Irresistible, Baby!

The Met’s Las Vegas Rigoletto

November 30, 2013

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

We're in Las Vegas, circa 1960. “The Duke” is a Sinatra-like singer and the powerful owner of a casino where vice, money and decadent entertainment abound. He’s also a serial womanizer who can never get enough of the ladies. In fact, his entourage of suave men in shiny tuxedos often procures fresh prey for him. The hunchback Rigoletto is a comic who works for the Duke and is always poking fun at everyone, often pushing jokes too far. Enter a wealthy Arab sheik that Rigoletto needles obscenely as a cover to the Duke's recent conquest of his daughter. The humiliated sheik explodes in a rage and curses both the Duke and his comic. In a city where luck and superstition rule, a “maledizione” is serious stuff.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Rigoletto gets off his comic shift and goes home to his only family, his beloved daughter Gilda – a beautiful pious young thing he keeps locked up at home at all times (except to go to Sunday mass). He is too afraid the vicious men of the town may corrupt his good little girl. Bad luck has it that somehow the Duke managed to lay eyes on sweet, chaste Gilda and decides he wants her. This time his trick will be to play the part of a lovey-dovey penniless student, which works pretty well. Gilda falls romantically head over heels for the “student” who also seems totally taken though that, too, could just be another womanizing strategy.

The Duke’s entourage decides to play a prank on Rigoletto and, thinking that Gilda is his lover, they abduct her and bring her to the Duke for his entertainment. The Duke deflowers Gilda at lightening speed and immediately thereafter loses interest. When Rigoletto discovers what happened to his innocent daughter he is rage-crazed and swears to avenge her honor. His bloody vengeance involves a hired (but honest) assassin and his slutty sister and it may or not go as planned...

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Does this sound like an 1851 opera? Or more like a modern mob movie? The Met showed us that time and place hardly matter as this story could be set in 16th century Mantua or 1960s Las Vegas and work equally well. Either way, it’s rife with dramatic tension, fiercely passionate Verdi music and some of the most beautiful singing.

It was a thrill to see the Met’s 2012 Las Vegas Rigoletto again. The singers in last year’s inaugural cast for the debut of this new production were so spectacular that it hardly mattered where they set it. Revisiting it again this year with a new cast and Pablo Heras-Casado conducting, we stand by the conviction that this modernized production works. The sets are dynamic and elaborate and the story is only made more vivid than if they had kept it in sixteenth-century Mantua with men in tights and puffy sleeves.

This time we decided to follow the Met English subtitles throughout the opera. And not out of necessity (being Italian speakers and knowing Rigoletto by heart) but rather because we heard that subtitles, too, were innovated by this production. The Met pushed its modernizing efforts to the point of revising the traditional English translation of the Italian libretto to jazz it up with 1960s Vegas slang. Updating the subtitles to match the era in which the opera is set is sure blasphemy to purists and really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can engage the non-Italian speaking audience in livelier ways than a verbatim translation of 19th-century poetic language, which is admirable. On the other hand, however, it may be distracting and fall into the trap of going too far and radically changing the sense of the original, which is, indeed, a mortal sin even by our standards.

The Met did not fall into such trap and offered a refreshingly updated and often clever translation by Michael Panayos and Paul Cremo, without ever departing from the original core meaning but rather just massaging the text with glittery period touches that most times worked pretty well. Here’s an example:

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Original Libretto:

DUCA

Ma dee luminoso

In corte tal astro qual sole brillare.

Per voi qui ciascuno dovrà palpitare.

Per voi già possente la fiamma d'amore

Inebria, conquide, distrugge il mio core.

CONTESSA

Calmatevi …

Traditional Translation:

DUKE

So bright a star should be shedding

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

its brilliance on my court.

You would make every heart beat faster here.

The fires of passion already flare

headily, conquering, consuming my heart.
COUNTESS

Calm yourself!

“Rat Pack” Translation:

DUKE

Your movie-star looks

really light up the place

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Every heart in this club

should be beating for you

You’re irresistible, baby

you make me burn with love

you send me to the moon!

COUNTESS

Take it easy, fella!

The “astro,” or star, metaphor carries over into a reference to movie starlets, and the Duke’s court is appropriately reconfigured as a club, while the Petrarchan language of the consuming fires of love translate directly into hepcat talk. It’s colorful and clever and almost even more successfully poetic with respect to the otherwise rather bland conventional English translation also presented here. After all, the Duke’s character is the kind of superficial lady’s man who would have come up with zingers like: “Come on, baby, let’s give it a whirl!”

When it comes to narrative strategies, Michael Mayer’s production not only remains true to the core of the original opera but also adds several touches that flesh out better the characters. The Duke’s is one of the characterizations that benefited most from the Vegas take. In classic productions, when in Act II he is sad because he thinks Gilda has been kidnapped and he starts going all mushy about she being “the one,” it is always a bit hard to believe since the Duke is supposed to be a chauvinist womanizer. This production has him do lines of cocaine and drink hard liquor while he sings these arias, thus suggesting, in line with the core of the character, that the Duke was just babbling under the effects of hard drugs and stiff alcohol, and, no matter how convinced he sounds in his singing, his convictions are as steadfast as a feather in the wind. Later, in Act III this Sinatra-like Duke sings the famous misogynistic aria “La donna e’ mobile / qual piuma al vento” while twirling around the pole of a strip club, making it clear (in case there was any doubt) that he’s the fickle one, not women.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Another stroke of genius is the Rat Pack transformation of the Duke’s entourage that perfectly reflects the goliardic spirit of the courtiers, and very entertainingly so. Their chorus scenes are extremely vivid and effective, with a group of men in shiny multi-color tuxedos and a lot of hair gel gallivanting around in grand early-1960s cinematic style, all while singing Verdi. The three main Rat Pack characters, Borsa (Alexander Lewis), Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) and Count Ceprano (David Crawford) were definitely more fleshed out here than in other productions. Inspired by the likes of Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin and Sam Giancana, they evidently had a lot of fun with their roles and they were a pleasure to watch with their shenanigans, especially during some of the musical interludes.

This production at times even improves the narrative when compared to a more traditional setting. In fact, in Act II classic productions always struggle with a weak plot point when Rigoletto cannot hear the courtiers kidnapping his screaming daughter while he holds a ladder because he has a mask over his eyes (that allegedly also covers his ears?!?). Mayer cleverly solves the problem by sending Rigoletto “upstairs” in an elevator so that he’s not physically there when the actual kidnapping occurs and his failure to notice is thus made credible.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Željko Lučić was just so spectacular last year that it was going to be a tall order for Dmitri Horostovsky to match his predecessor’s performance in the eponymous role. With his action movie star good looks, Dmitri is not your typical Rigoletto. And boy did they do a number on him in make-up! His transformation from “barihunk” into old hunchback with paunch and a few strands of white hair combed across an almost bald scalp was terrific, particularly since the proud shaking of his flowing silver mane is one of Dmitri's signature moves in virtually every other role he performs. Also, one would think that both his haughty acting and fierce singing style generally better suit a sexy villain rather than the hunch-backed, pathos-invoking paterfamilias at the center of Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Photo credit: Ruby Washington / The New York Times

Dmitri’s acting was intensely accurate and generally successful in getting into character, showing a range that we rarely see from him. In the first scene he was hamming it up with the lounge dancers and twisting his hips like Elvis as he taunted the sheik, rendering the comic side of Rigoletto very energetic when compared to traditional settings. Horostovsky was a fairly convincing tender father in his duets with Gilda, however his best stage presence (not surprisingly) was in the raging bits, so much that in “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” he was a bit too busy forcefully acting and running from one courtier to the other, affecting a bit the intensity of his singing. While Dmitri’s angry-edged baritone sounded on the snarling end at times, he consistently delivered deep dark tones with hints of a smooth sweetness that made for a vocally charismatic Rigoletto. The evening we saw him, his voice felt unusually restrained in the first act, but when he loosened up he was sensational. His duets with Gilda were as lovely and heart wrenching as ever, “Fanciulla piangi” making the fanciulla of us cry copiously and Dmitri’s vocal performance in the third act ranged from vengeful to deeply dramatic to desperately defeated, just the way we like a Rigoletto.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

But it was the young soprano, Sonya Yoncheva, who stole the show while stepping in to replace Aleksandra Kurzak (pregnant with tenor Roberto Alagna’s child). Yoncheva sang consistently stronger than anybody else on stage, outshining even all of the seasoned Met veterans in this cast, including both Horostovsky and Polenzani. The piercing purity of her voice streamed effortlessly from her petite frame. With her frail yet powerful lyricism and her charming presence, Yoncheva dominated her scenes gracefully and tragically. Fresh faced and youthful, she really looked the part and embodied all the vulnerability of the poor tragic naïve Gilda. Yoncheva did not win Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2010 for nothing – definitely a singer to keep an eye on.

Matthew Polenzani is growing on us, while we were not convinced by his Nemorino in 2012, we enjoyed him in Maria Stuarda and Così and really appreciated him as the Duke. He delivered clean, fresh sound, clear articulation, on point tempo and musicality, and great Sinatra-like acting. On the whole, he is highly likeable, but he still does not stir the deep turmoil that a world-class Italian-style tenor should be capable of. We find Polenzani to be often too high pitched; lacking a certain manly depth, with his voice still sounding almost too young, remaining too firmly on the surface.  

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Slovak bass Stefan Kocán always exudes charisma with commanding stage presence and his Sparafucile was no exception. While we've seen and loved him before in the role, this time his acting got even better, portraying the honest villain (he may be a hired assassin but he's not a thief!) with the sleek confidence of a film noir actor. Vocally, Kocán has a deep, rich and smooth tone that somehow comes as a surprise from such a young singer and is always a pleasure to hear. We wish there were more extensive bass roles around so that we could get more Kocán –looking forward to seeing him as Konchak in Prince Igor in February!

A lot has been said about the spectacular sets of this production, for which no detail was small enough, from the diverse use of the “neon vocabulary” throughout the three acts, to the wink-wink references to the Met’s own decorative elements (gates, chandeliers, curtains), to the Nevada license plate of Sparafucile’s car ("SPARFUC"). We can only let the pictures speak for themselves and salute the Met’s set design team for the terrific effort.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

This production is to us the perfect example of a clever new take on a classic and thus a must see for virtually everybody: it may entertainingly lure opera-virgins into the art form, convert the traditionalist to modernizations of classic repertoire and refresh Rigoletto for those who know it by heart. Let’s hear it for Met Opera taking more calculated risks like this!

– Lei & Lui