The Mad Maiden of Orleans

Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco

Teatro alla Scala, Milan

December 23, 2015

Giovanna bears her cross triumphantly.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

Lei: It’s always exciting to go to a show at La Scala where so many of the operas we love first debuted. This time even more so because Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco was being performed again at La Scala 150 years after it was last staged there (in 1865, 20 years after its 1845 debut). And it’s not like it’s a La Scala issue, this opera is really rarely seen at any house around the world. Part of the reason seems to be the difficulty of finding singers able to tackle it. Which made this show all the more exciting. Vocal excellence! “New” Verdi! La Scala glamour! (and the pre-show Marchesino aperitivo with its cups of risotto alla Milanese remain a solid plus).

Lui: A much anticipated return to Milan’s Teatro alla Scala for the second installment in our holiday season opera tourism, this time for another rarity, a young Giuseppe Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco. Only his seventh opera, it’s really not the product of a green Verdi. Giovanna comes on the heels of Nabucco and Ernani and will be followed by Macbeth and Un ballo in maschera, among others, in quick succession.

Giovanna looks on as the king of her dreams is deposed.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

Lei: First things first, here’s a recap of the little known plot, which diverges significantly from both the Schiller source material as well as history. We’re in medieval France, during the infamous Franco-Anglo Hundred Years’ War. Enter the king, Carlo (Charles VII), very worried that his troops may be defeated soon by the Brits and ready to give up his crown. He had a dream where mysterious voices told him to go into the forest and lay his sword and armor by a certain oak tree.

A father begins to suspect malfeasance.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

The scene moves to the forest, where our pious maiden Giovanna lives with her intransigent and paranoid peasant father, Giacomo. Giovanna very much wants to fight with the French army and prays fervently to the Virgin Mary to procure her a sword and a helmet (una spada ed un cimiero). What a happy coincidence that the king left all his armaments next to the oak tree! So Giovanna is torn between demonic and angelic voices giving her conflicting instructions, but ends up happily putting on soldier gear and convincing the king to fight back. Her father is suspicious of all this and thinks she sold her soul to the devil.

Under Giovanna’s lead, the French crush the British in battle and the king and his lady-warrior fall in love, though Giovanna continues to hear voices and feels very sinful about the whole love thing. While everybody’s happy celebrating the victory, Giacomo publicly denounces his daughter of lustful behavior and witchcraft. Her terrified silence is seen as an admission and she’s turned to the English. When Giacomo hears her piously pray in the Brits’ prison, he understands her righteousness, frees her and even gives her his sword so that she can go back to battle. French army definitively wins, Giovanna dies on the battlefield and ascends to heaven in saintly fashion, the king and her father despair.

Giovanna in ecstasy.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala 

Lui: The production by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier was impactful and thought provoking. In their take, the protagonist is a disturbed young woman who has been transposed from the French Middle Ages to nineteenth-century institutional setting with a vaguely Freudian underpinning. Apparently suffering from some sort of schizophrenic hysteria induced by profound daddy issues, she aspires in her mind to a life of glory in the vein of Joan of Arc. And so, everything takes place in the confines of her room in the psychiatric ward, with armies, angels, demons, churches and statuesque equestrian kings all appearing as a series of vivid feverish visions.

Packing all this action into such a contained space emphasizes that everything is seen from Giovanna’s point of view. It’s all in her head. Rather than being a cop out, it is actually a clever trick to intensify the shaky plot of the opera. One of the ideas that inspired the directors were a series of early studies of hysteria conducted in the nineteenth century, documented by pictures of disturbed women going through extreme mood swings, including ecstatic contemplation. Interestingly, some historians have hypothesized that Joan of Arc’s saintly visions and voices were in fact due to some sort of mental illness (though many medical professionals disagree with such a diagnosis).

The patriarchy repents.
Photo credits: Teatro alla Scala

Lei: I wish I had seen a “traditional” Giovanna before in order to better appreciate the nuances and ideas of this one. The directors’ premise is that this libretto (based on Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans) has little to do with the historical character and is full of narrative holes (motivations of characters are not really fully developed), which gives them the freedom and even some grounds to interpret the story as the tale of a hysterical young lady having all sorts of Giovanna d’Arco visions and stories in her head.

The visionary hears voices.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

There’s no doubt that Solera’s libretto diverges quite a lot from history: Giovanna is torn between angelic and demonic “voices” (when she really only heard saints and angels and was always adamant about her sacred mission), she has a love story with the king Carlo (totally historically ungrounded), she is condemned by a bigot father (false again, she was subject to inquisition by the church at the request of the English) and she dies on the battlefield (though everybody knows she was burnt at the stake).

And so, the libretto’s propelling emotional forces are the love between Giovanna and Carlo and, most importantly, the oppressive and obsessive father-daughter relationship of Giacomo and Giovanna. Leiser and Caurier’s psychoanalytical take made the dramatic tensions even more about sexual frustration (Giovanna wants Carlo but her father and the angelic voices pull her back) being the propeller for the heroine’s heroic deeds in the name of God.

Giovanna gives in to her baser desires.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Lui: I’m torn as to whether or not the production hit the nail on the head or just confounded matters unnecessarily. At the core the story in the libretto is relatively straightforward for an opera. It takes certain liberties with time and place but the general narrative flow only slightly borders on the avant-garde or surreal. Even the central father-daughter relationship is par for the course for Verdi, despite its unhealthy fixation on her virginity.

The production here takes those mildly avant-garde elements of time lapse and interiority and runs with them. On the whole I found the poetic license of the directors to be engaging and very satisfying, making the whole thing very deep and Freudian. Really poor Giovanna is a young woman repressed by her father. At the same time, there is a Don Quixote approach to the story where this simple peasant girl aspires to battlefield glory in the name of God and for the good of her country.

The religious warrior suits up.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

In fact, in moments, as in the end of Act I, where she prays for the guidance of the Virgin Mary in her early quixotic desire to wage holy war against her enemies and to vindicate the king, I couldn’t help but think that the directors were also subtly drawing parallels with the religious warmongers of today. Giovanna has delusions of grandeur. Although her heart is seemingly in the right place, her desires are out of step with reality for a poor girl kept under lock and key by her father in some kind of convalescent ward. It was heartbreaking, oneiric, often surreal, and very intelligently carried out.

Lei: The orchestra was incredibly electric. I’ve never heard anything quite like it and from the first fiery bars of the overture when, after the soft start, the orchestra attacks the military triumphal themes, I didn’t know what hit me. So vigorous, fiery and intense. My first thought was that they were all on steroids, including maestro Riccardo Chailly who sported the energy of someone half his age. We were in very good musical hands. The pacing was thrilling. The opera sped along on overdrive, which contributed to the haunted feeling that Giovanna is not well, not in her right mind, but possessed, especially since the orchestra itself felt possessed.

Riccardo Chailly on fire.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Lui: The score was just fantastic, packed with sensational and breathtaking musical moments carrying a very fast paced plot. It was fun to discover that Giovanna contains a lot of Verdian musical nuggets that the composer will develop more fully in later operas. Most of the demonic bits reminded me of Macbeth, particularly in the forest and storm sequences with the forest chorus sounded a lot like Macbeth’s witches. Other times, Un Ballo in Maschera, Ernani and Traviata also come to mind. And so, Rossini was not the only one to “recycle” bits of his operas...

Lei: Verdi’s use of the chorus in Giovanna d’Arco is extraordinary. In this opera more than others the narrative importance of the chorus (magnificently lead by maestro Bruno Casoni) came across, making it really the fourth protagonist. It wore so many hats: poor folk, people broken by war, “voices” of demons and angels, British soldiers and French courtiers. The “voices” are particularly important as they play a central role in pushing Giovanna to action (and then martyrdom), even more in this production where everything is just in her head.

The chorus is an all-encompassing presence.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

Lui: On stage and/or just off stage but still heard, they really do fill the role of something like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. They push the plot forward without actually becoming agents in the plot. They comment and they inflict themselves through moralizing or lazing or tormenting the protagonists in some of the most novel ways that I have ever seen in an opera, almost borrowing moves from Aeschylus’ Eumenides. The very particular way the chorus was dislocated in this production was pretty sensational too. I am still trying to figure out where the off-stage singers were as many times the voices felt like they were coming from the prima galleria. These unusual staging decisions added to the eerie surreal take on the story as a whole. I loved it. It produced such a unique musical experience.

Giovanna is tossed in a sea of torments.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

Lei: The core cast was sensational. The three leads were extremely strong, with perfect voices for their roles. Anna Netrebko keeps getting better each time we see her. She displayed a superb vocal range and convincingly portrayed the fiery warrior but also the loving and mystical maiden, inspired and idealistic (and very cuckoo too). She’s always had power but now her sound is cleaner purer and her Italian more articulate. In fact, the Russian soprano sounded much better tonight than in her live recording of this same opera only two years ago in Salzburg. It is exciting to see such a great artist grow over the years. Netrebko’s acting was very specific and demanding, as she basically was always on stage one way or the other given the directors’ choice to have this be all in her head. She bounced around with youthful energy and intensely rendered Giovanna’s swings from crazed demented girl to warrior to determined martyr.

Declarations of love.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Francesco Meli as Carlo may be my new favorite tenor. He has a beautiful effortless sound, round and ardent, fills the space with a lyricism that’s very powerful too, as he held strong next to Netrebko (who usually drowns everybody out). As the gold plated king who had just descended from his equestrian statue mount, he was incredibly gripping. The whole opening three numbers are all his and he set the tone with an urgency that carried us through the rest of the night.

Verdian baritone Carlos Alvarez as Giacomo displayed a smooth legato, long lines and a wonderful musicality. His role of the paranoid almost demonic father is a complex one and he embodied it expressively, particularly touching in his final act of repentance when he realizes he entirely misunderstood his daughter. Bass Dmitry Beloselskiy in the minor role of Talbot, the English general had an impressive stage presence (he’s extraordinarily tall and muscular) and an even more astonishing voice, deep and dynamic yet extremely strong and effortless, riding with ease over the orchestra and chorus.

The patriarch who cannot be trusted.
Photo credit: Brescia-Amisano/Teatro alla Scala

Lui: The sets created by Christian Fenouillat were deceptively simple as they had as a base Giovanna’s room (with very few pieces of linear furniture), but as the plot unfolds all of the protagonist’s visions come to life in that same room. And that’s when the exciting stuff happens: the chorus popped out now behind transparent portions of the walls at the ground level now up above next to the ceiling, soldiers and spears broke through the walls during battle scenes, very vivid videos of lusty desires and saintly aspirations scrolled slowly across the walls, the massive cathedral of St. Denis emerged from the floor to then descend in thunder at the end of Act III, the statuesque golden king emerged from a trapdoor on his gold horse (very much like a monumental equestrian statue, as that’s how Giovanna imagines her ruler). And the very clever touch of having everybody but Giovanna and her father disappear as half of the stage literally sinks underground at the end of Act IV when she’s about to die and all her visions fade away.

A daughter burns at the stake in her mind.
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Costumes by Agostino Cavalca very equally clever: all characters wore medieval clothes except for Giovanna’s father who, like her, belonged in the nineteenth century, emphasizing how the true and very troublesome dramatic core of the opera is the father/daughter relationship. And Giovanna, who navigates reality and fiction, had the most fluid and feverish transformation on stage during Act I: one moment she is a lost long-locked girl in a nightgown, the next she is cutting her hair, shredding her gown to a short tunic and donning gold armor and a helmet right over the top of her bed clothes, proudly pointing a sword towards the audience.

Una spada ed un cimier
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Lei: I have never seen the merciless and hard to please public at La Scala go so unanimously wild with love and appreciation for all of the performers, musicians and directors. Maybe it was because Giovanna d’Arco is little known and rarely performed (and so the public does not have the tools to trash it like it does with more mainstream repertoire). Whatever the reason, this time there was none of the hooligan-like loggionisti behavior booing and shouting colorful insults left and right, rather, people were outdoing each other yelling “Brrrr-aviiiii!!!” at the top of their lungs and literally going crazy calling the cast back at least three times even after final bows. Not even at the stadium do you see such ardent displays of love and support! And that in itself was the most sensational and surprising sight of the evening.

– Lei & Lui

Unleash the ovations!
Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala

Giovanna's spirit rides on... and on.
Photo: Place des Pyramides in Paris, France

Hip Verdi Pills in Bushwick

Loft Opera Summer Session

Verdi Selections from Traviata, Luisa Miller, Trovatore and Aida

September 25, 2015

The Muse Circus School, Brooklyn

Viva Verdi!
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lei: Loft Opera did it again, they managed to pack a full house with a young, artsy, hip audience and make them cheer for Verdi as if it was the coolest new thing in Bushwick. Whatever their secret is, it works and it’s electrifying and refreshing to be a part of it. This time the venue was The Muse, a circus school in very, very deep Brooklyn, right next to an auto repair shop and a number of shady looking vehicles just out of car accidents or worse. I had to tiptoe around a lot of shattered glass and who knows what else to get to the front door, but once we were in the scene was incredible. Mismatched chandeliers dangled next to trapezes, a red curtain with a VERDI light bulb sign framed the back of the space, a piano in the center, wood platforms at the four corners. 

The perilous venue.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The incredible part was that the public was mostly under 30 and the seats, benches and banquettes scattered around were all full, with people saving seats for their friends, so much that we had to go to back of the house to get a couple of extra chairs to sit on. At some point I even saw a girl taking a selfie with the VERDI sign, it does not get more XXI century than this. Most of the time the average public at indie opera shows is on the geriatric end of the spectrum and definitely does not fill up a space this big or takes selfies for that matter. This time I was not the youngest in the public and had very mixed feelings about it.

The public in Bushwick.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lui: LoftOpera has the winning combination – the special sauce, as founder Brianna Maury puts it. Somehow she manages to make opera infinitely hip. A hundred-odd youngsters, hipsters, artists mingle with the old timers and the intellectuals. The product is always high quality. The singing strong. The concept sexy. In fact that is quite possibly the true beauty of it. In addition to staging full scale scores in all their full-blown diva-filled glory, LoftOpera manages to boil the operatic down into little bite-sized nuggets.

Lei: The formula was pretty simple: 4 singers – soprano, mezzo, baritone and tenor – performed 4 show-stopping duets from Verdi operas accompanied just by a piano played by maestro Sean Kelly. As the program notes put it: “That’s what our Verdi selections are all about: giving you a chance to hear Verdi’s music, truly Olympic-level singing, from just a few feet away. Letting you feel how it makes your stomach vibrate and your ears ring. Find a seat, get your tissues ready, and hold on to your butts.”

Suzanne Vinnick as the pleading Leonora.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lui: The lightness of touch of the piano accompaniment allowed the voices the maximum exposure. It was raw and almost visceral especially if the singers were singing in your general vicinity in the cavernous postindustrial space. The singers sounded loud and clear. Their voices resounding among the rafters often over the sound of unexplainable drilling going on outside or on the roof?!? Or else clambering for prominence over the sound of a passing L train.

Lei: The voices and raw emotions were definitely front and center here. It was interesting to experience Verdi duets in this setting and even more so to observe how the hipster public reacted to it. While there were supertitles, it was hard to see them (at least from where we were sitting) because of how the lighting was set up, however that did not matter. The public was so captivated by the singing and the music that it was not even following the supertitles, since the narrative framing of each vignette provided in the program notes was sufficient to give a general sense of what was being sung.

Joshua Jeremiah unleashes his Conte.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lui: Tonight, they performed four Verdi duets from Traviata, Trovatore, Luisa Miller and Aida, and they closed with one of his most famous drinking songs (there’s one in every Verdi opera by my reckoning). In each case they managed to get me to rethink some of the details and minor themes lurking beneath the surface of these familiar moments from such classic works. Experienced in isolation like this, the theme of last resort love, loss and the inexorable passing of time really came to the fore from Violetta’s scene with Germont in the first excerpt from La Traviata.

Lei: As to the specific selections presented, the most successful was by far the Conte di Luna/Leonora duet from Act IV of Trovatore. Baritone Joshua Jeremiah and soprano Suzanne Vinnik not only sang their hearts out with passion and fire but also acted convincingly. Jeremiah embodied the evil Conte di Luna with a brutal rage so intense that it was scary, while Vinnik pleaded with him in desperation and offered her body with tragic sacrifice to save her beloved Manrico. The chemistry between the two singers was electrifying and goosebump-inducing. These two artists were good but not as sensational in their Violetta/Germont duet from Act II of Traviata, where, however, the soprano displayed a pretty impressive and powerful instrument, particularly in the higher register.

Dominick Rodriguez looks on.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lui: A profound intensity of emotion emerged from the duet from Trovatore. It was like jumping right to the juicy bits and made me hungry for our upcoming afternoon with Dmitri Horostovsky and Anna Netrebko in the same roles at the Met next week. It’s like seeing old friends with fresh eyes. In his second duet of the evening, baritone Joshua Jeremiah now singing the Conte di Luna had warmed up. He was suddenly much stronger, exuding an emotional intensity and belting out a rounder less tremulous sound out of his baritone voice. He sounded still green as Germont, but here he found his voice as a young and power hungry lover. Soprano Susanne Vinnik was a tortured soul in her own right. She let out her little yelps of resignation as she reciprocated with a tormented passion all her own.

Luscious sounding mezzo Karolina Pilou.
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Lei: The other duets were between tenor Dominick Rodriguez and mezzo Karolina Pilou, who sang selections from Luisa Miller and Aida. Pilou has a beautiful instrument with a lusciously plush sound and definitely a lot of power (so much that it often drowned her companion Rodriguez). Of the two duets they performed, the Aida one was most successful at displaying a more tangible tension between the characters portrayed. The finale of the show brought the four singers together in a light-hearted rendition of Libiamo nei lieti calici from Traviata, with LoftOpera general manager Brianna Maury handing out beers to the singers so that they could appropriately toast among themselves and with the public around them.

Lui: Tonight's program embodies a formula that can be infinitely reworked and repurposed with greater frequency. They can make little bel canto pills, tight baroque confections, miniature verismo morsels that have an even greater possibility of serving as a gateway drug to new opera fans. After all, there is an abundance of aspiring opera singers in this city, all of whom have at least a scene or two in the arsenal. LoftOpera could easily repackage and repurpose any of those pieces in any form they please. Especially if it has that pop. They could make opera cool and pertinent and now again. Sex it up. As they continue to prove. 

Lei: The non-traditional patrons went pretty wild and that was a testament to the genius of Verdi and the power of opera. One does not need to speak Italian or be a musicologist to be moved or appreciate extraordinary singing portraying powerful emotions and opera does not need to be stuffy or geriatric. Quite the contrary, when done in the right setting with a few beers around the place, opera can indeed be the next cool thing in Bushwick.

- Lei & Lui

Libiamo ne' lieti calici!
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

che la bellezza infiora
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Hip young public lingering and raving about VERDI
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

From Darkness to Light and Back

Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta & Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle

Metropolitan Opera

January 29, 2015

Opening night (after snow delay)

After surviving a false alarm of a snowstorm and dodging a handful of anti-Putin protesters picketing the Lincoln Square, we made it to the Met for the opening of a double bill of two dreamy one act operas in two unique new productions at the Met.

Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta

Iolanta: Eyes are only for crying
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The story of a blind woman who has never been informed of her condition. This is Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta. She has been kept in isolation by her dominating father and has lived her whole life up to now thinking that we have eyes only for crying. When an unsuspecting stranger stumbles upon her home in the forest and he spills the beans about the beauty of sight, she is overcome by shock. It is a woman’s journey from darkness into light, with extremely poetic passages, such as the need to know what to desire before being ready to receive it, as well as love’s transformative force and a lot of nice stuff about the wonders of nature made even more wonderful by the force of light. We are repeatedly reminded that light was God’s first creation, and so religious symbolism is also very present, though I wonder if it is significant that the doctor who performs the miracle of restoring Iolanta’s sight is a Muslim gentleman. The opera is a cosmopolitan affair, set in France, sung in Russian, and featuring a Moroccan doctor who invokes Allah, go figure.

Seeing the light with her heart
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The cast was pretty solid across the board. Polish tenor Piotr Beczala as the evening’s prince charming Vaudémont was strong and expressive, though his higher register is not the most soaring. Yet I generally prefer Beczala’s Russian performances (think last year’s Onegin) to his Italian roles (think Alfredo or the Duke), where his articulation does not always feel so natural. Russian baritone Aleksei Markov, as his friend Duke Robert, who is betrothed to Iolanta but in love with the sultry Mathilde, was the best male singer on stage. We discovered him as Germont in La Traviata last week and were really impressed by his instrument. Here his role was much more relaxed and carefree and his acting fit right in with his joyful, ardent singing as someone who is young and in love. And of course Anna Netrebko starred as Iolanta. She embodied the heroine with a remarkable innocence with her chesty voice that really flows with an effortless fluidity in Russian. It was impressive to see her succeed in this frail, tender, pure role after her uber-evil, unbridled force of nature performance as LadyMacbeth earlier this season. While the Russian soprano was vocally superb, particularly in her soaring duet with Vaudémont on the beauties of nature and light, I could not help but thinking that her voice is a touch too womanly for such a child-like character. Bass Alexei Tanovitski as the intransigent King Rene and baritone Elchin Azizov as the Moroccan doctor Ibn-Hakia were both solid grounding forces of the opera, though not particularly impressive.

The skiers arrive
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

In Tchaikovsky’s hands (and under Valery Gergiev’s baton), sung Russian is phenomenally beautiful, melodic and smooth. And considering its late romantic date (it debuted in 1892), the composer still gave us a number of moving melodic numbers, including several dramatic arias and a couple of memorable duets with tunes that really stick in your head. So much of it is really very dreamy and poetic, to the point of being a bit soporific as it plods along at a somnolent clip, despite the action packed second part of the short opera. In many ways, it reminded me of the dreaminess and symbolism of Debussy’s impressionistic masterpiece, Pelleas et Mellisande.

Trelinski's idea of paradise
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The Mariusz Trelinski’s production was a bit disjointed, in the sense that it seemed to be set in a desolate wasteland of a space in the mountains or in the woods with uprooted trees strewn about around Iolanta’s little boxy wall-less house. So the general vibe was a stark kind of sadness, yet characters entered the scene remarking what a paradise the place is. I didn’t get it. It just didn’t work. Also, what was Prince Charming doing in that get up? Beczala shows up in leg warmers and a Uniqlo ultra-lightweight futuristic ski jacket and he just didn’t seem to fit in the otherwise 1930s mountain cabin setting. Not only that but he comes toting merrily a pair of skis, even though there isn’t a lick of snow anywhere to be found. He seems to have stepped not only out of the future (a future with high-tech affordable Japanese apparel) but also out of a different season. His winter to her spring. Finally, when Iolanta is cured and happily marries, the director’s idea of a visually exuberant and joyful ending is having uprooted trees get grounded and a massive chorus of waiters pop out. Maybe I don’t get Eastern European modern sensibilities, but that really did not work as a grand finale.

 

Iolanta's apotheosis
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

I understand that there is some kind of profound spiritual symbolism underlying Iolanta’s trajectory from darkness and spiritual insight into the light, no matter how disappointingly stark reality is once you can actually lay your eyes on it, but I just don’t see the full extent of these concepts very compellingly played out in this particular staging of it. Maybe it’s true what Anna Netrebko says about the opera in the liner notes to her recent recording of Iolanta for Deutsche Grammophon, namely, that it is not actually necessary to stage it. The beauty comes through in just a concert performance. The music says it all. Seeing with the heart, or, in the audience’s case, with the ears, is more transformative than seeing with the eyes, especially when what we have to look at is some half-baked trendy staging. A good production should heighten the sense of the libretto and the score, it should guide the audience to a deeper understanding of the subtleties and the storyline, highlight the ideas, elevate the emotions. When a production muddles the sense it can be most distracting.

Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle

Judith steps into darkness
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

Bluebeard’s Castle could also be considered a story about a woman overcome with the desire to see, the desire to know everything about her lover whom she follows obsessively into his scary castle, abandoning all light and hope behind her, almost in a Dantesque Inferno-entering manner. Through the dark woods she traipses. Judith’s journey from light and freedom into darkness and captivity is perfectly opposite Iolanta’s, neatly justifying the Met’s choice to present these two works together.

Bluebeard's enthralling power
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

German soprano Nadja Michael was stunning as Judith. She had dynamic stage presence, was very agile (not surprisingly since she was once a competitive swimmer), and managed to bring this character to life largely through her tormented and slightly possessed acting chops. Nadja Michael didn’t always have music to sing through which to express her character. Because the score is so relatively spare, she had to rely on her physical presence on the stage to tell the story. Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko as Bluebeard himself was strong too. While we first discovered him as Galitsky in Prince Igor last season, here he looked and sounded like a completely different (and much better) singer: darker, thicker, manlier and definitely scarier.  Bartók’s score does not necessarily give either of Judith or Bluebeard a lot to work with in terms of emotional vocal palette, however, they created the unsettling atmosphere of the piece in a way that I found riveting.

The journey through the castle begins
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

Welcome to my torture chamber
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The production was very unusual. Mariusz Trelinski and his design team went for a horror film look that incorporates projections and electronic interludes that felt a little uneven but made for a very unique evening at the Met. A welcome change of pace. Though here too what was staged was often at odds with what is being stated or sung or declaimed in scary voices on and off stage, I found this take much more captivating than this same director’s approach in Iolanta. Bartók’s score lends itself to the creepy and campy and horror of Trelinski’s imaginative, often surreal staging. It had a very cinematographic feel, opening with a car approaching in the distance and stopping at the edge of a forest at the very back of the stage. A tall blonde woman, wearing a glamorous aquamarine silk backless evening gown, steps out of the car and follows a moody, dark-haired mystery man, wearing a tux with an undone necktie. They get through a dark, garage-like entrance, with glass walls dripping with rain (the walls are crying), and from there the downward spiral journey begins. We follow Judith in her quest through Bluebeard’s castle, from an art deco elevator suspended on the side of the stage, to a butcher-like torture chamber, a dreamy bathtub (supposedly representing the treasury, go figure), a Hitchcockian dining room with blood stained flowers, soaring views of a woodsy kingdom, a claustrophobic room tiled like a crossword puzzle (a lake of tears?!?) and the final other-worldly scene in which Judith encounters her own burial in the third person and the spirits of Bluebeard’s ex-wives.

 

An homage to Hitchcock's Rebecca
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The Lake of Tears
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The seventh chamber
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / Met

The singers, especially Nadja Michael, really sold this surreal and scary take. She had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. She really got bodily into the role of the possessed wife who as it turns out seems already to have died around the time that she ended up at Bluebeard’s castle, where it was already her destiny to end up a prisoner with the rest of his corpse brides and ex wives. And so her morbid curiosity to dig deeper into her new husband’s pathological secrets after penetrating his blood stained torture chamber and corridors with walls that cry suddenly makes some kind of sense once we get to the end. Though the ultimate allegorical force of the whole thing is never really fleshed out or spelled out. Trelinski gives us an out of body experience in an almost Lynchian key, rather than a meditation on the horrors of Europe in the midst of the Great War, which is the key in which I have heard it read in the past. The continent had been through so much that no one any longer wanted to see. In Bartók’s piece, a woman’s morbid curiosity pushes past the point of widespread denial, in what was definitely the scariest and most unusual opera we’ve seen so far.

 - Lui & Lei