Rooting for Amneris

Verdi’s Aida

Metropolitan Opera

October 2, 2018

The leading ladies go head to head
Photo credit: Met Opera

Aida is not among my Verdi favorite operas, it’s too schematic. Still, this time the Met secured an exciting cast, with most of the lead singers being top notch: Anna Netrebko in the title role, mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili as Amneris and baritone Quinn Kelsey as Amonasro. I never cared much for the tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko (here as Radamés), but I was willing to put up with him given the rest of the cast.

All of the PR buzz was, understandably, concentrated on Anna Netrebko’s ticket-selling powers. The Russian super diva has been moving towards heavier repertoire and, according to an interview earlier this year with Opera News, this was the “top in difficulty” for her, so it was particularly interesting to check her out:

“Verdi did almost a trick on the soprano in Aida, because after two acts, which are quite heavy and demanding, with lots of singing, low and also high, above the chorus — my god, the second act, it’s killer — and then suddenly Aida comes into the third act with a completely different voice [...] You will be in trouble if you don’t prepare a strategy for this act. The aria, the duet with Amonasro, the duet with Radamès — it’s like a non-stop marathon, and your body is saying, ‘Okay, well, aaaaagh — when will this be finished?’” (Opera News, March 2018)

While I admired Netrebko’s Aida, I was not overwhelmed by it. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her performance, it was flawless, her voice at the height of its power, full and lyrical. The problem is that I am not crazy about the character itself. Aida is a tragic heroine, yes, but without much fire in her. She is mostly torn between a secret love (for Radamés, Egyptian general) and duty (to her family and country, Ethiopia, at war with Egypt). She is in a subordinate and powerless position (a slave at the Egyptian court), is manipulated by her scheming father, and finally chooses to die quietly (in a sealed tomb with her lover). Aida’s signing is beautiful, but generally either distressed or nostalgic.

Aida, the suppliant
Photo credit: Met Opera

Netrebko did everything she could to give depth to the character, but no matter what she did, her Aida paled next to Anita Rachvelishvili’s Amneris, who quite frankly stole the show and made it clear that when the Egyptian princess is portrayed by an amazing singer, she is the most interesting character of the whole opera.

Aida assumes the pose of powerless subordination
Photo credit: Met Opera

The dramatic complexities of Amneris span different levels: she is madly in love with Radamés, but also hyper jealous, her main suspicion is (rightly) her slave Aida and she does not hesitate to use her power to trick and humiliate her. After the pharaoh gives Amneris’ hand to Radamés, her joy quickly turns to vindictive rage once she discovers that her bridegroom is betraying her love and country. This rollercoaster leads to the trial scene in Act IV where emotional temperatures rise even more: Amneris is torn between her deep love for Radamés and her wounded pride, she wants to use her powers to save him from a death sentence but only if he forgets Aida. When he refuses, she unleashes her rage:

Chi ti salva, o sciagurato,
Dalla sorte che ti aspetta?
In furore hai tu cangiato
Un amor che ugual non ha.                
De’ miei pianti la vendetta
Ora il cielo compirà.*

But only to repent in despair shortly thereafter:

Ohimè!… morir mi sento… Oh! chi lo salva?
E in poter di costoro                    
Io stessa lo gettai!… Ora, a te impreco,
Atroce gelosia, che la sua morte
E il lutto eterno del mio cor segnasti!**

She then begs passionately the high priest to pardon Radamés and, when that does not work, she curses him and storms off. I mean, come on! Give me more of this and less of wimpy celeste Aida!

In a way, Amneris’ explosive tragedy reminded me of certain operatic soprano assoluta characters such as Elisabetta (in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux) and Bellini’s Norma, who are torn because of the conflicts between their public power and private passions.

Amneris on the verge
Photo credit: Met Opera

In the hands of Anita Rachvelishvili, Amneris came to life as a passionate, viscerally intense woman on a mission. Her fluid smoky instrument ranged from light and lyrical in Act II when she dreams of her loved one, to threatening and menacing when she tricks Aida, to then fully unleash with fury, doubt and despair in the turbulent trial scene in Act IV, with such an intensity that I felt shivers down my spine. Rachvelishvili’s acting was terrific too, her body so perfectly in sync with the emotions of her signing – here are her thoughts on this moment:

Amneris is “just in love, that’s all. And she is jealous, like every in-love woman. She is so distressed that she is losing her only love. When it comes to the last judgment scene, I concentrate all my energies. You have to express yourself not only with the voice but with everything, the body — put out all of your emotions, all of your pain, in the maximum way possible, so that audiences feel what she feels in that moment.” (Opera News, January 2018)

A manipulative Amonasro guilt trips Aida
Photo credit: Sara Krulwich / NYTimes

Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey was one of the most exciting discoveries in last year’s Met season (in Trovatore and Lucia). His voice is of a rare grounded expressive beauty, big and effortless and with impeccable Italian diction. As Amonasro, he unfortunately does not have too much to do but his Act III duet with Aida delivered thundering fireworks when he threatened his daughter of terrible things unless she coaxes critical military info out of Radamés. I cannot get enough of this baritone, definitely looking forward to seeing him again later in the season as Germont.

Radamés is a man in demand
Photo credit: Met Opera

In the heroic role of Radamés, tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko was just okay. He could get there technically but his instrument just lacks warmth, thus confirming my theory of the current crisis of heroic tenors. Seriously, who else is out there who can tackle these roles (other than Kaufmann who’s been calling sick for years at the Met)? It’s just so depressing when a heroic character comes across as bloodless.

Disappointing tenor aside, this Aida sure delivered a great night at the opera, with the classic grand production looking timeless, the chorus in top form and the orchestra doing justice to the score under the baton of maestro Nicola Luisotti.

– Lei

The Met does grand opera
Photo credit: Met Opera

With the star power to match
Photo credit: Met Opera

(*) From the fate now hanging o'er thee / Who will save thee, wretched being? / She whose heart could once adore thee / Thou hast made thy mortal foe. / Heaven all my anguish seeing, / Will avenge this cruel blow!

(**) Ah me! death's hand approaches! who now will save him? / He is now in their power, / His sentence I have sealed — Oh how I curse thee, / Jealousy, vile monster, thou who has doomed him / To death, and me to everlasting sorrow!

Men on the Verge

Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing

BAM Next Wave Festival

Howard Gilman Opera House

October 5, 2017

The lightning rod of a community of fallen soldiers as consummate optimist
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

Walt Whitman somehow always manages to remain pertinent. He comes up even when you least expect it. Not only did he make a prominent cameo in Ben Lerner’s last novel 10:04, for example, but a lost novel by the poet the himself also recently emerged from the archives and has had us abuzz again about this most American of wordsmiths. We just can’t stop talking about him. The prodigiously talented young composer Matthew Aucoin’s magisterial opera, Crossing, lends us yet another opportunity to reassess the omnipresence of this seemingly measureless American figure.

Aucoin draws on the omnivorous diaries Whitman kept during his volunteer years as a nurse in the Civil War and published under the title Memoranda During the War. In a stroke of genius, a figure found therein named John Wormley gets a fictionalized treatment; or rather he becomes a pivotal plot device in the opera. He is the one who gives the story its main thrust and its primary sense of drama.

The poet finds himself in a cold, dark wood, lost to himself
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

The opera begins with an elderly, grey-bearded Whitman paraphrasing Dante in the throes of a midlife crisis: “In the middle of the journey of my life, / I found myself a self I didn’t know.” When the show opens most of the stage is walled off. Our hero is hedged in, blocked from life. He is surrounded by projected images of an unsettling dark forest scene consisting of the chiaroscuro shadows of gnarled leafless trees, animated by a jittery moving camera, which sets the tone for the poet’s Dantesque moment of existential doubt.

The man who would never be the same again
Photo credit: Steven Pisano

Much of what Aucoin has set out to dramatize is the effect that the war had on Whitman’s creative spirit. The standard narrative of his career casts the Civil War as a turning point. It’s not that he stopped writing in the aftermath, but he never wrote again with quite the same verve. It’s almost like a part of him died along with the country’s innocence. Which is maybe what makes the story told here, not only timeless, but utterly timely for the world we inhabit today, perhaps even more so today than in the pre-Trump era when it was written.

We open on an iconically bearded, avuncular Whitman who expresses his uncertainty about who he really is: “Known to the world as Everyman, / I did not know who I was.” He is no longer content embodying the persona he painstakingly constructed in his antebellum poetry, that of the Everyman who “contains multitudes.” The very foundation of his claim to fame, the core of his poetic and largely public identity, is in question.

What is it, then, between us?
Photo credit: Steven Pisano

“What is it, then, between us?” he ponders. A line from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is the first big quote to make a cameo from Leaves of Grass. It provides a sort of thesis statement for the night. What is the nature of the boundaries and borders that separate us. What does it take to breach them? What is it about our shared humanity that unites us despite the illusion of autonomy that limits and distances us from one another, as individuals and as a nation?

At this point the partition that closed off much of the stage is removed, revealing the Civil War hospital where Whitman served as a nurse during the waning years of the conflict. He came to check on his wounded brother, which is what brought him there, he recounts, but he continues to stay and doesn’t know why. He must be looking for something, he muses.

The poet as designated caregiver
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

His role at the hospital is an almost maternal. Whitman is not a trained medic but he is the sole designated caregiver. The opera is basically a portrait of this larger than life man. His most oversized characteristic is consummate optimism. He is always there to cheer the men up, especially when a particularly gloomy pessimistic adversary stumbles into the ward and is, quite literally, on a mission to lay everybody’s spirits low.

Enter John Wormley, a minor figure who makes a cameo appearance in Whitman’s wartime diaries and around which Aucoin has constructed a fictionalized drama and love story. As it turns out Wormley’s mission is even more insidious than merely raining on their already glum parade. He is a mole, a confederate soldier in disguise who wants to leak information about the camp hospital back to his rebel comrades.

Enter Wormley, the negative to Whitman's purely positive valence
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

The tug of war between Whitman’s relentlessly positive outlook and Wormley’s dismally negative one continues over the next several tableau that constitute the body of the opera, until a relationship of some sort comes suddenly, and rather shockingly, to fruition, despite the sketchy outlines we are given. It is eventually also “consummated,” I suppose, in a scene that concludes with the two men fully clothed and spooning on one of the beds in the crowded group barracks.

From bedside to bedside we go
Photo credit: Richard Termine

The moment is the opera’s imagined climax of a scene that takes its cues from the striking poem entitled The Sleepers: “I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn, / I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the other dreamers.” Whitman’s uncanny aptitude for containing multitudes turns voyeuristic in a sexually suggestive kind of way. “I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk,” Whitman says at one point in the poem that Aucoin brings to life on the stage, bestowing upon his confused characters the fulfillment they crave, whether they acknowledge the craving or not.

Love in the time of war knows no boundaries
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

Because the heightening of their intimacy only gets superficial treatment at best, we don’t quite believe Whitman, in an otherwise tender and moving moment, when he professes his love for the dying traitor, whom he cradles in his arms later in the opera: “Oh my son, / I never loved another / Till you.” The quintessential Whitmanesque sentiment of exalting the universal in the particular and vice versa is nevertheless clear. It is the sentiment we find upon the introduction of Wormley. Uncle Walt’s embrace of every man in his inclusive utterance: “I am with you,” sums up his beautiful gesture of friendship and acceptance. Dramatically, however, I was not particularly convinced that the emotional finale of the opera in this penultimate scene hits its mark, despite the fact that musically it was incredibly effective.

More intellectually than emotionally stirring is Wormley’s sudden Whitmanesque epiphany about the earth’s welcome and release of his marching feet when he felt that he was every soldier in the lead up to his passing in the arms of his lover. Having won out in the end, Whitman’s positive outlook seems to have sent the troubled young pessimist into a conniption fit of appreciation for life in all its minuscule nuances. It is a stunning moment in the score.

Wormley sees the Whitmanesque light in a beatific vision of his own
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene 

On every other count, however, it would seem that Wormley gets the least exciting writing both musically and otherwise to sing. In a subtle ploy used by the composer, once Wormley reveals his true identity (after posing as a Yankee soldier), his voice intentionally alters to reveal distinctively southern cadences. It is a minor detail in the grand scheme of the texture of the opera, which is why it hardly makes up for the fact that so much of the rest of Wormley’s role is otherwise relatively bland.

Tenor Alexander Lewis played John Wormley as a bedraggled soldier, a wounded vagrant with nothing to live for. Baritone Rod Gilfry leant his embodiment of Walt Whitman a wise world-weariness.

Freddie Stowers goes into a mystic trance
Photo credit: Steven Pisano

The greatest highlight musically and the most thrilling and inventive writing of the night went to Freddie Stowers, the fugitive slave who had fled to the north on foot in search of his freedom only to march back to the south as a soldier to fight for the freedom of others. The ineffably velvet-toned bass-baritone Davóne Tines sang the role, which was composed explicitly for him. His instrument is perfectly suited to the hybrid sounds that Aucoin wrote for Stowers.

In his one big aria, just before the Sleepers segment, Tines breaks into soaring story mode. He recounts a delirious vision he had when he escaped to the north and claims to have glimpsed in his fever dream the “future of humankind on the earth.” His otherworldly ecstasy has him singing in soulful southern spiritual cadences.

The herald arrives with a message of hope
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

This is the kind of thing that I personally look for in a contemporary opera: the crossing of musical boundaries beyond traditional operatic vocal expression. Depending on the story being told, composers today have a whole universe of other traditions to draw upon in order to cross pollinate and fruitfully contaminate their scores. Stowers’ old-timey spiritual was one of these moments to savor.

In a world of male nurses and female messengers, soprano Jennifer Zetlan sang the golden bearer of good news – the token female role – with sunshine in her hair. At a particularly tense moment in the plot, Zetlan bounded into the hospital in a pastoral cotton dress with bright locks of buoyant brunette curls tousled on her head, fresh as a daisy, relatively speaking, as though she wandered out of an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

Not only does Zetlan provide our only glimpse of a world outside the misery of the war and the wasteland it leaves in its wake, but she is the only woman in an otherwise purely male, homosocial world. Her arrival ignites Wormley’s fear. Would she reveal the true identity of the treacherous guest? No! She comes in triumph, with news that the war is over. The rebels have been defeated and the union of country remains strong.

The men are spent come war's end
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

If that sounds like cause to celebrate you’d be wrong. All of the poor wounded men feel used, spent like money to win the war. It is a dismal climax, no matter that we’re on the winning side. It seems to serve as a commentary that there are no winners in war, which would echo great classic war epics like Homer’s Iliad. Instead of exulting in the victory of the Union forces, the hospital is torn down and everybody saunters off with their wounded bodies and their tattered pride.

The world according to Whitman
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

Whitman’s prose in the Memoranda is an exciting kaleidoscope through which the writer filters everything he experiences, witnesses, thinks, feels, observes, contemplates. It reads like a diary though – a fragmentary day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of a life lived in the moment. I wasn’t sure how the libretto would manage to turn it into something with a narrative.

Instead, the inspiration driving the opera forward is admirable and feels more pertinent to the American experience than ever before. The conceptual crossings that it addresses are many: between two individuals; across enemy lines; from wartime to its aftermath; between life and death.

But what kind of world does Aucoin create musically? The repetitive minimalism of Philip Glass most certainly makes a cameo appearance or two over the course of the opera and it was most effectively used to capture Whitman’s signature cosmic curiosity. For a writer who loved Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi, is this the way we are to understand Whitman would have heard the music of the world? I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. But it was nevertheless a uniquely well-rounded and profoundly human experiment in modern opera.

– Lui

 

Memoranda during the war
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene

The post-war period is an even greater wasteland than before
Photo credit: Gretjen Helene