Art That Speaks to Us

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

On the first Thursday of October, I went to BAM to see the Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera. Naturally my standards for this play are extremely high: the affinity I feel for it extends beyond its title to a number of its qualities and themes, and I always find it easy to criticize the shortcomings of a less-than-ideal production. Luckily, Robert Wilson, who directed this German-language, English-supertitled production, was at his most astute, and the performances by the Berliner Ensemble regulars could not have been bettered. Though it was hardly a traditional interpretation of the work (Macheath, for instance, was played in near-drag as a strange cross between Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin), it seemed to get at the very heart of Brecht’s intentions, and for me it worked beautifully, weirdness and all.

The conceit behind the show was that we were seeing a version of a Weimar-era film, not unlike Pabst’s 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera (whose scratchy soundtrack played behind the opening scenes of this production), but with elements of The Blue Angel, Modern Times, Lulu, and other classic movies mingled in. From the initial parade of heavily made-up, grotesquely exaggerated characters across the harshly lit stage, to the final all-group rendition of the dourly ironic song that closes the play, this was a production that borrowed the black-and-white, judderingly edited, vaudeville-influenced look of late-silent and early sound films. Buster Keaton was there in the marvelous (and in fact nearly overwhelming) performance of Tiger Brown by the spectacular Axel Werner; both Keaton’s and Chaplin’s heroines seemed to underly Stefanie Stappenbeck’s spirited rendition of Polly Peachum; and Stefan Kurt’s galvanizing Macheath went from the dolled-up appearance of a Weimar transvestite to the fetchingly graceful manner of the Little Tramp—a genre-bending look that was accompanied, every time he opened his mouth, by a singing voice that marked him as a man even as it recalled Marlene Dietrich’s glamorously seductive tones.

For those who are used to sympathizing heavily with Mackie Messer, this performance may have seemed a bit too filled with Brecht’s vaunted Alienation Effect to work as theater. But for me it brought the character into balance with the play, giving him an appeal that was more theatrical than sexual, more unnerving than heroic. The fact that all the actors in the play knew how to follow Brecht’s technique to the letter—fixing the audience with their glittering, accusatory eyes while singing their discordant lines with purposely less-than-perfect tuning—made for a remarkable evening of theater. As one has learned to expect from Wilson, the pace dragged at times; had I been allowed to edit, I would have cut ten or twenty silenced-filled seconds from just about every scene in the first half of the show, reducing the total running time to something closer to its usual two-hour length. But I’ll concede that even the odd pacing was ultimately salutary, in that it gave a sense of propulsive rush to the later scenes, which were performed without the languorous pauses.

It was here, in the final minutes of Mackie’s near-hanging episode, that Wilson’s production really earned its keep. For as Macheath stood on the gallows with a noose around his neck and delivered his lines defending the relative innocence of small-scale “artisan” crooks—”What is a picklock compared to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”—the BAM audience burst into spontaneous applause. It was one of those moments when history catches up with an old play and makes it sound entirely new. What might have seeemed mere preachiness or tired dogmatism forty years ago, when I first heard these lines, now sounded like a rousing speech from this morning’s Occupy Wall Street demonstration. The opera had become true again.

***

I had a similar sense of being spoken to directly when I went the very next night to see George Clooney’s latest film, The Ides of March. This is perhaps less surprising, in that the film has just been released. But it is based on a play (Farragut North, by Beau Willimon) that came out in 2008, and that was in turn based on political events of 2004 and perhaps even earlier. So the echoes of our own present dilemma, however pointed they may seem, have entered in by serendipity, or perhaps by prescience, but not by direct historical imitation.

The Ides of March has been wrongly reviewed as a political thriller or a typical Clooney caper movie—the kind of cheerful, light entertainment in which we can identify with handsome characters, thumb a nose at middle-class morality, and enjoy a pleasant evening out. It could not be further from this. In fact, it is in some ways even colder, harsher, and more alienated than Brecht. If the movie is tense and in its own way gripping, that is not because we are dying to know the answer to the thriller questions; it is because we can somehow sense the downward spiral on which we have been launched. The despair of the movie’s ending is built into the idealism of its opening—and for those of us who had the highest of hopes for this administration when it was elected in 2008, that despair is recognizably ours.

Clooney and his collaborators have created a movie that is not about who wins or loses an election. Instead, it focuses on the sure but devious ways in which our national political process, broken beyond repair, inevitably destroys everybody who participates in it. There is nobody in this movie you can wholeheartedly like. Ryan Gosling, who puts on all his boyish charm for the role of deputy campaign manager working for the presidential hopeful, ends up devoid of any true emotion, dead-eyed and icily ambitious. And George Clooney gives one of his best, most restrained, and least lovable performances as the candidate himself. When this character smiles, it is with his mouth only—the expression never reaches his eyes. If we liberal viewers long for him to win the presidential nomination, it is because we love what he is saying: his advocacy of the Constitution over Christianity, his attack on the death penalty, his defense of the poor. When, in the end, he turns out to be just another compromising, compromised politician, the emotional impact is like a stab in the heart. If this movie is too depressing for the average ticket-buyer (and its sales figures would suggest that it is), that should not be taken as its flaw; on the contrary, it is its tremendous virtue as a truthful work of art. That stab in the heart belongs to us. Its cause is politics as we know it, in our own time, right now, when even the most blinkered observers are being forced to realize that something has gone very, very wrong.

—October 16, 2011

 

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Tetzlaff Times Three

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

In mid-March, as I was leaving the Carnegie Hall concert that Christian Tetzlaff had just given with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I ran into a couple of friends. “Oh, we should have known we’d see you at this!” they said (because concerts are where we always run into each other). “We’re here for Tetzlaff. He’s our favorite violinist.” There are, of course, a great many wonderful violinists in the world today, ranging from astonishing twenty-year-old virtuosos to unforgettable seventy-year-old masters, and in such a context it might seem ridiculous to single out one above all the others. But I think that, if pushed, I would have to agree with my friends. Tetzlaff is my favorite violinist.

That March concert was one of a number of events he’s doing at Carnegie Hall this year, since he is the designated “Perspectives” artist for the 2010–2011 season. So far I’ve seen three of these performances, and each was thrilling in a different way.

The BSO event did not start out promisingly. James Levine had just canceled out due to ill health (and in fact he was soon to resign his post as BSO conductor altogether), so the young replacement conductor, though perfectly adequate, was not the charismatic leader the majority of ticket-holders had turned out to hear. And even those of us lured in by Tetzlaff’s presence were slightly underwhelmed by the first half of the program, which featured a charming but brief Mozart Rondo and then a rather senseless Harrison Birtwhistle premiere. The Birtwhistle violin concerto was at once difficult and superficial—a sort of movie-score music, complete with fake suspense and pointless drama, but without the visual accompaniment that usually makes such music bearable and even useful. At the intermission, I was wondering if it had really been worth coming out on a cold night even for a program that featured the indefatigable Christian Tetzlaff in all three works. But then, after the break, I discovered why I was there. Tetzlaff’s performance in Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto was so exciting, so forceful, so delicate, and so moving that it put everything that came before it (even the Mozart!) to shame.

Tetzlaff is a stand-out performer with an orchestra (I first heard him in Brahms’s violin concerto, also at Carnegie, and it was a revelation), and he is also a great solo player (his rendition of the complete unaccompanied Bach sonatas and partitas, performed a couple of seasons ago at the 92nd Street Y, remains one of my concert high points). But possibly his most appealing work is done at the chamber-music level, where he has a chance to be both intimate and grand at once. The other two concerts of his that I’ve seen this season were a performance by the Tetzlaff Quartet (he plays first violin, his sister plays cello) and a concert with the Ensemble ACJW, a group of young Juilliard-connected players who rope in various masters for each of their events. Both of these were held in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the attractively modern underground venue whose only flaw is a tendency to filter in the occasional noise of the subway. Even this I found forgivable, where Tetzlaff was concerned, because I was so entranced in his and his colleagues’ engrossment in the music that nothing else seemed to matter.

The Tetzlaff Quartet concert, which I attended just last weekend, was a study in subtly connected contrasts. The evening began with Haydn’s unconventional Op. 20, No. 3—not at all what you are expecting when you see a Haydn quartet listed on the program—and then moved on to Mendelssohn’s stirring, complicated Op. 13 (written, unbelievably, when the composer was only eighteen). By intermission my companion felt he already had a great concert under his belt, and he was tempted to leave before the second half, which featured Schoenberg’s First Quartet, since his prior experience of Schoenberg had not been positive. “Trust Tetzlaff,” I recommended, and at the end he agreed I had been right, for this performance of the Quartet No. 1 in D Minor was unlike anything either of us had ever heard from Schoenberg. Located somewhere between German Romanticism and the Second Viennese School, it had an expressiveness all its own—an emotionally rich if at times discordant expressiveness in which all four instruments had an equal share. Yet even in this gathering of equals, I felt I could hear Tetzlaff’s own individual voice every time it sounded, as if his violin were able to speak for him just as particularly and recognizably as a tenor’s or a baritone’s instrument does. And that eerie singularity, far from destroying the coherent feeling of the chamber group, only intensified it.

Possibly the best and certainly the most thrilling of the three concerts I heard Tetzlaff give this season was the December performance with the Ensemble ACJW. Gathered together on the relatively small Zankel stage were not only the young players and Tetzlaff himself, but also the incomparable Simon Rattle, who had been brought in to conduct, and the marvelous soprano Barbara Hannigan, who was helping the group perform an excerpt from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre. The whole evening—which also included Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, and a suite by Rameau—was at once serious and playful: especially serious in the rendering of the solemn Metamorphosen, and especially playful in the Grand Macabre outtake (where, for instance, the sexily attired soprano at one point shoved Simon Rattle away from his conducting spot and proceeded to lead a few bars of the performance herself, until he booted her in the rear end and took back his rightful role). The whole evening was a deep, sometimes dark, sometimes exhilarating pleasure. And a great part of my own joy lay in watching Christian Tetzlaff among his fellow performers, those young musicians who had been invited to stand alongside one of the very greatest violinists of our era and play, essentially, as his equals.

—April 12, 2011


 

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My Shostakovich Book

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

I don’t generally favor using blogs for self-promotional purposes, but I have been persuaded that it would be a good idea to let my regular readers know that a book I have been working on for four years is finally about to come out. It’s called Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, and it’s a rather strange, hybrid work in which I view the quartets in relation to the composer’s life and the life in relation to the quartets. Though it’s being published by Yale University Press, it is not at all an academic book. In fact, it’s aimed at general readers who may or may not know very much about Shostakovich—as the pianist Menahem Pressler (founder of the Beaux Arts Trio and profound admirer of Shostakovich’s music) suggested when he told my publishers, “Music for Silenced Voices is a book for those who love Shostakovich and for those who are going to love Shostakovich after they read it.” William Kentridge, the artist who did last year’s terrific production of The Nose at the Met, and Laurel Fay, America’s most erudite Shostakovich biographer, have also had nice things to say about the book.

But enough of this. Let me just give you the first few pages of the first chapter, so you can decide for yourself if you want to read more:

Chapter 1. Elegy

In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.

—Mikhail Zoshchenko, in a private letter about Shostakovich, 1941

It is hard to say whether he was extraordinarily fortunate or profoundly unlucky. Even he would probably have been unable to decide, for in regard to his own situation and his own character, he was often dubious and always divided. He was a self-acknowledged coward who sometimes demonstrated great courage. A born survivor, he was obsessed with death. He had an excellent sense of humor and an equally strong streak of melancholy. Though reserved in outward demeanor and inclined to long silences, he was subject to bouts of intense passion. Mentally and physically he tended to be either lightning fast or practically immobilized. He was both a generous man and an embittered one. Immensely loyal to his friends, he was repeatedly guilty of disloyalty to his own principles. He cared a great deal for words, and he signed his name to documents he had never read. He was a modernist who officially despised modernism. He was a baptized unbeliever with a strong affection for the Jews. As for his country, he both hated and loved it—and the mixed emotion was returned, it seems, for he became at different times a prominent beneficiary and a prominent victim of his nation’s cultural regime. He was an essentially private person who lived out his existence on a public platform. He wrote music that pleased the many, and he wrote music for the very few: perhaps, finally, only for himself. We know a great deal about him, and he remains largely invisible to us.

In this last respect, Dmitri Shostakovich is like all subjects of artist biographies, only more so. You are drawn to the life because you love the art, and you imagine that knowing more about the life will bring you closer to the art, but for the most part the life is a smoke screen getting between you and the art. You pick up threads and clues, searching for a pattern that explains the whole, forgetting that a great deal of life (and art) depends on chance events. You can never definitively find the hidden springs of an artwork; you can only attempt to grasp the results as they gush forth, and with music, which is nearly as changeable and bodiless as water, that grasp will be especially tenuous.

Nevertheless, there is a desire to connect the human being who once lived to the still-living music, which seems to have a human voice behind it—doeshave a human voice behind it, if only one could hear it properly. For me, and I think for many other avid listeners, Shostakovich’s own voice is most clearly audible in his fifteen string quartets. He became famous in his lifetime for the symphonies and operas, and it is through these larger-scale works that most people know his name today, but those are precisely the works of his that were most subject to interference by the Soviet authorities. The interference was internal as well as external: that is, Shostakovich often censored himself, distorting and suppressing his own talent in order to write the kinds of pieces that were demanded of him as a public artist. But nobody at the top of the Soviet Union’s cultural hierarchy paid much attention to what he was doing in his smaller-scale, under-the-radar chamber music. So whereas the symphonies can be bombastic or overblown or afflicted with moments of bad faith, the quartets are amazingly pure and consistently appealing. Taken individually, each represents a major contribution to the string quartet literature; taken as a whole, they stand as one of the monuments of twentieth-century music. And as a key to Shostakovich’s own preoccupations—as a kind of “diary” that records “the story of his soul,” as his widow put it—they offer unparalleled access to the composer’s inner life.

Musicians who play Shostakovich’s string quartets can read that diary through the music: that is how they manage to perform the quartets, even if they know little or nothing about the composer’s life. You can get the whole story from the fifteen quartets themselves, if you are alert enough. But I am not alert enough, and I am not a musician, so I have had to go about it backwards, by way of the life first and then the music. Only after learning something of the biography have I been able to hear what was there all along in the quartets.

When we nonmusicians listen to music, we respond with an awareness of logic and pattern and history, but also with our emotions and imaginations, and to put these responses into words is not an easy matter. In speaking about Shostakovich’s quartets, I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism. I have tried to remain faithful to the specific demands of music, which by its very nature is less imitative of reality, less “naturalistic” or “figurative” than literature or painting. Still, my approach to Shostakovich’s music is essentially that of a writer, and this entails certain pitfalls. To hazard an interpretation, in the literary sense of the word, is to venture an opinion (some might even call it a guess) about what was intended or accomplished in a work of art. The line between correct interpretations and incorrect ones is bound to be fuzzy and inconstant; even the artist is not the ultimate authority in this regard, for he may well have given rise to something that is larger than his own intentions. (In fact, if he is a good artist, he has almost certainly done so.) But there arewrong interpretations, wrong assumptions, wrong pathways in approaching an artwork—or, for that matter, a life story. To say that opinions can vary is not to say that anything goes. And in dealing with Shostakovich it seems especially important to keep the known facts in mind at all times and to adhere to them, precisely because falsehood, dishonesty, and misrepresentation were such devastating issues in his life.

To uncover the truth about a dead artist is always difficult. Many things stand in the way: jealous colleagues who lie about their competitor to make him look worse; sycophantic followers who lie about their hero to make him look better; innocently inaccurate memories, which get the facts wrong and compound the myths; contemporary reviews, which are often silly and always subjective, then as now; and the artist’s own secretiveness, or evasiveness, or simple inability to articulate what he is doing in his art. But to these normal layers of obfuscation, Shostakovich’s case adds many more. Silence was at the heart of his enterprise. It is there in his music (which, especially toward the end, seemed to be pulling the notes out of a deep silence, or sending them back into it), and it is there in his personality (there are numerous stories about his sitting in silence, even in the company of friends), and it is there, most particularly, in the conditions of his twentieth-century Russian life. To speak, in those circumstances, was to betray, and to speak the truth was to betray oneself. Even private letters could be intercepted; even private words could be conveyed to the wrong ears. History got rewritten every few years, and no one was safe from the sudden switchbacks. So the wise kept their own counsel and didn’t put anything down on paper, except nonsense and distractions. People learned to speak in code, but the codes themselves were ambiguous and incomplete. Nothing that emerged from that world (or perhaps, indeed, any world) can be taken at face value.

This is why the uproar over Solomon Volkov’s Testimony—which purports to be the unmediated truth about Shostakovich’s experiences and opinions, as told to Volkov by Shostakovich himself—is finally moot. Perhaps the controversy had some meaning when the book first appeared in 1979, with Shostakovich only a few years dead and the Soviet Union still alive; perhaps it seemed significant then that Shostakovich could say nasty things about Stalin, the Party, and the whole Soviet machine. After all, his New York Timesobituary had described him as “a committed Communist,” and though people within Russia might have been aware, even at the time, of his uncomfortable relationship to authority, no one on the outside spoke of it. But now we have numerous other kinds of evidence—the oral testimony of the composer’s friends and relations, recently published letters to and from him, analogous instances in previously unprintable novels, stories, and poems, and our own increasingly informed sense of how life in that time was lived—to suggest that Shostakovich could never have been the placidly obedient Party apparatchik he was sometimes made to seem. So Volkov’s central and rather doubtfully obtained revelation is no revelation at all. And, perhaps more importantly, nothing is gained by this sleight-of-hand effort to transform the reluctant public figure into a secret dissident, for the Volkov portrayal of a resentful, self-righteous Shostakovich is far less appealing and finally less persuasive than the tortured and self-torturing man it replaces.

As for the rest of the book, well, anyone who has ever read a bad transcription of a poorly conducted interview will recognize in Testimony the feeble efforts of the speaker’s voice to make itself heard over the static generated by the interviewer’s biases and preconceptions. Some elements of his own opinions do probably make it through, which is why we Shostakovich-seekers are all tempted to mine Testimony for the fragments that are personally useful to us. But we need to recognize that in doing so we are essentially choosing at random, with no certainty about the veracity of our selections. We could be quoting Shostakovich, or we could simply be quoting Volkov—a character straight out of Gogol or Dostoyevsky, rubbing his hands with oily fake-servitude as he announces proudly in the preface that Shostakovich called him “the most intelligent man of the new generation.” Even this remark needs to be taken as coded (if indeed it was ever spoken at all), seen as a typically dark joke, similar to the one Shostakovich made annually when he offered as his New Year’s toast, “Let’s drink to this—that things don’t get any better!”

* * * * * * *

And so on. If you think you’ll want to read the rest of it, you can order it on Amazon or at your local independent bookstore. (It doesn’t officially come out until March 8, but I think some copies may be available a bit sooner.) And it’s even coming out as an e-book, I believe, so you could conceivably read it on your iPad and listen to a complete recording of the quartets at the same time. In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy it—and I hope if you do enjoy it, you’ll write to me and let me know.

—January 4, 2011


 

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Seeing The Hard Nut Once Again

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is a Christmas confection, but I first saw it in the summer. It was August of 1995, and my husband and I and our ten-year-old son traveled north from London to catch the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival. We were already fans of the Mark Morris Dance Group—I had fallen in love with L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato when it first premiered in America in 1990, and had subsequently helped organize a Berkeley conference around it—but we had no specific expectations for The Hard Nut and were basically just there for fun.

And it was fun. In that 1995 production, Morris himself had two roles—as a drunken party guest in the first-act Christmas party and, in the second half, as the leader of the Arabian women, a seductress with come-hither eyes and a swirling diaphanous caftan. Kraig Patterson played the black maid in toeshoes; a rather hefty opera singer, Peter Wing Healey, took the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum; the charming and diminutive June Omura played the rambunctious Fritz; and the incomparable Rob Besserer performed the central part of Herr Drosselmeier. The sets based on Charles Burns comics and the costumes of the party guests hilariously recalled the Sixties in a way that was both stylized and accurate. The party itself was a tremendous kick, and the various national dances performed in the second half were vigorous, playful, and (as always in Mark Morris) perfectly attuned to the music. I might have wished that some of the lovers’ duet between Marie and the Nutcracker Prince had been reduced a bit, or perhaps turned into dancing instead of kissing, and I might have found myself getting impatient with some of Tchaikovsky’s most romantic passages. (What was wrong with me?) I hope I noticed how beautiful the snowflake scene was, but more likely I was just thrilled by it, as first-time audiences always are.

After the performance, since we were acquainted with the dancers from their Berkeley visits, my family went around to the stage door to greet them in that foreign land. We were whisked inside and our son was instantly taken off to the dressing-rooms, where he was treated like the company mascot. Then he reappeared with a couple of company members, who informed us that the whole troupe had been invited to a party at the Lord Provost of Edinburgh’s official chambers: would we like to come along with them? Of course we would! So we climbed into their touring bus and spent the rest of the evening in one of the grandest public spaces I have ever partied in, complete with festive food, a bevy of excited dancers, a smattering of Edinburgh worthies, and the Lord Provost himself (who, if memory serves, gallantly shook my small son’s hand).

In the years since then, The Hard Nut was repeatedly performed in Berkeley around Christmas time, and we began to give a party for the dancers after the last performance. My husband and I felt like slightly less comic versions of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum; at one point we even considered buying a videotape of a log fire to play on our TV during the party, just as the Stahlbaums do. My son became adept at serving the dancers their drinks—mainly bottles of beer retrieved from the ice-filled bathtub, which was the only place in the house big enough to chill that quantity of beer. The dancers ate and drank and smoked and laughed and mingled with the poets, writers, and academics we had assembled to meet them. At one party they even sang Christmas carols, accompanied on our out-of-tune old upright by Ethan Iverson, who is now a noted jazz performer in The Bad Plus but was then the dance group’s music director.

We haven’t given that MMDG holiday party for quite a while now—our schedule and the dancers’ made it impossible—but we still try to catch The Hard Nut whenever we can, and I have probably seen it at least ten times over the course of fifteen years. This year, my husband and I and our twenty-five-year old son and his girlfriend (herself a former dancer), along with almost all the freshmen in my Hunter Honors College arts class, caught it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Things have changed, of course. Morris hasn’t danced the Arabian princess role in a while, and this year he even gave up the drunken party guest in order to take over the part of Mr. Stahlbaum. Peter Wing Healey has long since been replaced by John Heginbotham, who dances the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum with such delicate beauty and emotional authenticity that stagehands have been known to fall in love with “her” until they learn, to their disappointment, that she is really a he. Marie and her Nutcracker Prince are now embodied by Lauren Grant and David Leventhal, a real-life married couple (both marvelous dancers) who manage to make even the kisses seem like dance. Passages that seemed slow or merely routine to me at first, such as the scene changes (which get some of the best music), or the thrilling way all the different characters come back in mismatched sets at the end, now make complete emotional sense. I have come to love the music—all the music. And though I regret the absence of key dancers from the company’s past, I appreciate the uniformly high skills of the new people who have arisen to take the roles of snowflakes, flowers, rats, GI Joes, and others.

Marvelously, Kraig Patterson is still the maid and June Omura is still Fritz; sadly, Rob Besserer has retired, and I miss him terribly, no matter who is dancing Herr Drosselmeier. But this year an impressive young dancer named William Smith III took on that demanding role, and I have great hopes for him. Smith has the necessary acting ability as well as the grace and strength to dance the part, and though I still see Besserer’s shadow around him (especially in the incredibly moving sequence—perhaps my favorite thing in all of dance—when Drosselmeier has a duet with his younger Nutcracker self, and then the snowflakes fly, and then the aging magician walks diagonally upstage through them, causing the spinning flakes to fall still as he passes), I can almost imagine a time when I will be able to admire his performance for itself alone.

—December 18, 2010

 

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Edmund de Waal’s Hare

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Every once in a while a book comes out that is so great, all you have to do is summarize the plot to hint at its greatness. It’s not that Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a heavily plotted work: it’s a family memoir, for one thing, or a work of cultural history, or a strange, Lilliputian-telescope view into massive world events, so it depends for its plot on what really happened. And it depends for its effectiveness on its masterful storytelling voice: de Waal, though he is actually a potter by profession, is the kind of cunningly sensitive writer one only runs across a few times per decade. Still, when I have simply told you what the book is about, I suspect that many of you will want to rush out and read it.

On several visits to Japan—where he was, among other things, learning his trade as a potter—de Waal, the English son of a half-Dutch Anglican clergyman, became close to his Great Uncle Iggie. Ignace Ephrussi, an elderly gay man who had lived in Japan for many years with his younger Japanese partner, was the brother of de Waal’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother; he also turned out to be the proud possessor of a unique and wonderful collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that had been handed down in the Ephrussi family since the late nineteenth century. Edmund, upon learning that he is to be the eventual heir to the collection, decides to investigate the history of these small, expertly designed, witty yet beautiful Japanese objects. In the course of examining who owned them over the course of a century and more, he gives us an astonishing look into several distinctly memorable corners of European, Asian, and even American culture and history.

The original collector was Charles Ephrussi, part of the Paris branch of this international Jewish banking clan (which seems to have been second only to the Rothschilds, with whom it freely intermarried). Having spread out from Odessa to Vienna and Paris, the Ephrussis quickly acquired enough polish to spawn art collectors as well as bankers—and Charles, who was apparently a fine amateur art critic as well as an early exponent of japonisme, was perhaps the most artistic of the lot. A dandy and boulevardier, he was friends with Manet, Pissarro, Degas, and Proust, and in fact he seems to have been the primary model for Charles Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. (Swann wrote about Vermeer, Ephrussi wrote about Dürer; each hobnobbed with aristocrats until falling out with them over the Dreyfus affair; each had a beautiful, willful mistress who wore Japanese kimonos; and so on, through many similar parallels.) In 1899, a few years before his own death, Charles gave his netsuke collection as a wedding present to his younger cousin Victor, a member of the Vienna branch of the family.

So now the tiny objects move, in their fancy display case, to the center of Freud’s, Schnitzler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Karl Kraus’s world. The vitrine occupies the dressing-room of Victor’s wife Emmy, where the children (including Iggie) are allowed to play with the valuable netsuke—the hare with amber eyes, the monk bent over his begging dish, the various kinds of fruits and vegetables, creatures and humans and objects—as if they were merely toys. And there they remain, through all the vicissitudes of the first third of the twentieth century, until the family finally flees Vienna in 1938.

But here I am going to stop telling you the story, because I don’t want to ruin the surprises that Edmund de Waal has very carefully set up. This book is as much about the discoveries he makes, and how he makes them, as it is about the objects and their surroundings; it alternates between a you-are-there sort of historical recreation (describing, for instance, how the children must have felt as they played hide-and-seek behind the tapestries in the grand Palais Ephrussi) and a more personal communication with the reader, here and now. It is a delight from start to finish—though a painful delight, in many places, given the history of the Jews over that century—and I could barely put it down to go about my normal life. Now that I have finished reading it, I wish I had it all to do over again. And so, like Iggie handing the netsuke on to the next generation, I am handing this incredibly valuable story on to you.

 

—August 26, 2010

 

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Two More Canadian Shows

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A while back I recommended Slings and Arrows as an alternative for those who were suffering Wire withdrawal, and as time has continued to burnish my memory of watching that great Shakespearean series, I feel even more strongly about it. But television-watchers must have continual new fodder, and so I have had to seek out some of the other Canadian shows available on Netflix to fill the continuing gap. (The presence of Treme on “real” television has done nothing, it turns out, to feed my Wire hunger: beautifully shot as that new show is, it simply lacks the hateful characters, the devious misdeeds, in short the necessary violence that made the earlier David Simon series such a masterpiece.)

My two new discoveries are both set in Vancouver, and both are Chris Haddock productions. (I presume that Chris Haddock is, in some sense, the Canadian David Simon, since he creates, writes, and occasionally directs his own very personally inflected, somewhat grungy TV programs—but all I really know about him is that his name appears on these two shows.) The first one I found, which was made earlier, is Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it features a coroner named Dominic Da Vinci, a Vancouver citizen of Italian descent (though you could have fooled me: he looks and sounds Irish).

As with The Wire, the higher-ups among the “good guys” in Da Vinci’s Inquest are as bad as any of the perps, and a great deal of the pleasure of the series comes from hating them and their machinations. Da Vinci himself is an appealingly working-class guy (his father was a stonemason, as we learn in one episode), who is not a medical doctor himself but is in charge of a group of medical pathologists, including his own ex-wife. The ensemble acting in this show is terrific, and so are the bleak but also beautiful shots of Vancouver; but the main thing that makes the series stand out is that we get no real solutions to the murders. Oh, we may find out who committed the crime; we may even, occasionally, see that person brought to justice. But either the problem is too large to be solved by a single conviction, or the perpetrator is too connected with powerful interests to be punished sufficiently, or the crime itself is not, in legal terms, a crime, but simply the kind of accident that arises when society doesn’t care enough about its poorest, weakest members. Da Vinci’s Inquest is resolutely skeptical in its outlook—one might almost call it anarchic, if that didn’t imply a lack of concern, and Da Vinci himself is nothing if not concerned. He is the kind of subdued hero you can’t bear to part with, and the abrupt end of the series after a mere two or three seasons comes as a terrible blow.

Luckily, you can then turn to Intelligence, which I must say is the most addictive television program I have ever watched in my life. Even The Wire had its occasional longueurs, its moments when I was ready to nap if I had to sit through one more long speech about something; but I cannot open up a new disk of Intelligence without watching every single episode on it, even if this takes me to the small hours of the morning. The plots are so convoluted and the resolutions so infrequent that you begin to feel that you and the characters are juggling a million balls in the air, and yet the various people in this show are so persuasive, so viscerally present, that you never forget for a minute who they are and what they are doing in the plot.

At least one central character in Intelligence, the mob boss Jimmy Reardon, is played by an actor carried over from Da Vinci—that is, the excellent Ian Tracey. Other roles are filled by people I feel I have seen before in Canadian shows and movies (and sometimes American ones: James Garner’s old Rockford Files sidekick, Stuart Margolin, appears in a few episodes of Season One). There is a black crime-unit inspector, Mary Spaulding (played by Klea Scott), who eventually heads up her own spy shop, as well as variously backstabbing or helpful male colleagues who work with her; and there are many other mobsters with whom Jimmy routinely deals, including his partner Ronny, his bodyguard Bob, his sometime antagonist Dante, and his occasional ally, Fan. (Dante represents the Italian “biker” group, Fan the Vietnamese crew; all these people are engaged mainly in drug-dealing and money-laundering, though they do a sideline in murder and mayhem as well.)

The government figures sent out from Ottawa to oversee and intrude on Mary Spaulding’s difficult work do not impress one with their sincerity and intelligence, but the worst characters by far are the Americans from the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. These people are so persuasively despicable that you are likely to find yourself mentally turning Canadian in response. (Reading in this morning’s paper about how Canada has handled Toyota differently from the way the U.S. has, for instance, I found myself unwittingly thinking: yes, we do things more sensibly here in Canada…a direct result of last night’s immersion in Intelligence.) At this point I only have one disk left to go in the second — and last available — season of the show, and I am already trying to figure out how I’m going to cope with that painful withdrawal.
—May 6, 2010

 

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An Excess of Riches

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A couple of weeks ago I went to a perfectly nice concert in Carnegie’s Weill Hall. It was the New York debut of a very talented young Scandinavian cellist named Andreas Brantelid, accompanied on the piano by the older and also talented Bengt Forsberg, and they were playing what looked in advance to be an interesting program: Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata, Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2, Debussy’s Sonata in D Minor, and Prokofiev’s sole cello sonata. And in the event it was interesting, and pleasant, and completely unannoying. But it was not thrilling. I have the feeling that the problem lay less in the performers than in the wide variety of profoundly exciting performances I had already witnessed that week. The nice little concert in Weill, which I would have killed for during the largely vacant months I spend elsewhere, just did not live up to the rest of New York’s late-winter riches.

The week began, for me, with a Saturday night solo recital by Andras Schiff in Avery Fisher Hall. Schiff is always worth hearing (I was to hear him again two days later, in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic), but there is a special appeal to hearing him alone onstage, because he always makes something unexpected out of the music. In this case, he played four pieces—two each by Mendelssohn and Schumann—and made them sound like nothing I had ever heard before. In the case of two of them, Mendelssohn’sVariations sérieuses in D Minor and Schumann’s Sonata No. 1, I believe I actually had never heard them before; but what he made of the more familiar Mendelssohn and Schumann Fantasies that he played after the intermission was equally surprising. Whether he is uncovering rarely played works or investigating familiar ones, Schiff is always discovering something. Going to one of his solo concerts is like listening in on a private session between a pianist and his piano—not that there is any tentativeness or redoing of errors, but there is a kind of openness and exploration that one expects to hear only in private.

That was followed, on Sunday afternoon, by just about the best performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony I have ever heard (and I have heard Gergiev do it with the Mariinsky Orchestra, which was my previous standard of comparison). In this case, the young Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski was leading his home orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra—again at Avery Fisher Hall, but this time under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Presents “Great Performers” series. The marvelous Shostakovich symphony in C Minor, written in 1936 but unplayed until after Stalin’s death, might just be Shostakovich’s best work on that scale; it is at any rate one of his most thrilling, with ear-splitting cacophanous vivacity countered by moments of quiet tenderness and a trailing-off ending that is filled with something close to mortal terror. And Jurowski and his London chums did it full justice.

Then it was Monday night and the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, for whom these musicians always play their best. Friends who had been to a previous night of this program advised me in the strongest terms to leave at intermission and skip the Hindemith Symphony in E Flat—and though I am not prone to taking other people’s advice, this suggestion was so emphatic (“It was horribly annoying; it left me in a terrible mood,” said one friend, and “It was composing indicative of the most rigid mind,” said another) that I happily obeyed. This left me with a one-hour gemlike concert—Andras Schiff performing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 as Muti led the Philharmonic beautifully in the background. It was the kind of perfect experience that made you wish all concerts lasted just an hour, and it only heightened my admiration for Schiff, and for Brahms.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights Valery Gergiev was conducting his own excellent Mariinsky Orchestra and Chorus in a concert version of Berlioz’s Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall. Though I am not normally a big Berlioz fan, I have learned to go to anything of his that Gergiev conducts, and this was no exception. The solo performances were great, the chorus was outstanding, and the orchestra was, as usual, beyond reproach. I basked in the ninety-minute intermissionless first part on Tuesday, and though I had to stay home on Wednesday to rest up for my big Thursday event, my friends who went to both halves said the second half was, if anything, even better. But that is the thing about New York: one lacks the pure bodily endurance to go to everything, even if conflicts, price, and distance were not a factor.

And then on Thursday I attended what, for me, was the high point of the week: William Kentridge’s terrific new production of Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, with Gergiev conducting the Met’s orchestra. I am going to write about this production in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, so I won’t say any more for now, except to comment that the three collaborators—Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge—turn out to share a sensibility that makes the sum of their collaboration even better than the individual parts. I went back to the Metropolitan Opera House less than two weeks later to seeThe Nose again, and if I could, I would go twice a month for the rest of my life.

So you can imagine what Brantelid and Forsberg were up against, coming on the Friday after all that. I only hope I someday have a chance to hear them again with a more open mind and a less depleted heart.

—March 25, 2010


 

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Bell & Jackiw

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

I know it sounds like the name of one of those semi-shady Dickensian firms of solicitors, but my title actually refers to the two star performers in last weekend’s events at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. In two separate programs presented by Cal Performances, Bay Area audiences were treated to surprisingly intimate encounters — surprising in a hall that size, I mean — with Stefan Jackiw and Joshua Bell, two of the best solo violinists in America today. What was interesting to me was how different the two experiences were.

Let me start with the Joshua Bell concert on Sunday, February 21, since that was in some ways the more predictable pleasure. The audience for the sold-out event was expecting wonders from Bell, which had the inevitable side-effect of making the marvels in question seem somewhat less wondrous. It’s not that it was a boring program — quite the contrary. Anything that starts with a Bach sonata, progresses through Grieg and Schumann, and ends up with the ravishing Ravel Sonata for Violin and Piano is bound to produce excitement. In Bell’s case, because he is even better at romantic and modern pieces than he is at baroque, the concert was a steady progression from good to great. He was accompanied, or let us say partnered, by the wonderful pianist Jeremy Denk, who is himself an acclaimed soloist, but who has the kind of self-effacing modesty and attentiveness to his fellow-performer that makes him the ideal second figure for a concert of this kind. The entire afternoon was completely enjoyable, and the Ravel was more than that: it was eye-opening, pleasurably startling, foot-tappingly jazzy, and obviously difficult to pull off with such finesse. Having heard this singular performance, I will never think of Maurice Ravel in the same way again.

The Friday night concert with Stefan Jackiw was in many ways the opposite kind of situation. Jackiw appeared as the soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, performed by the Russian National Orchestra under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev. I have to admit that I was drawn to the concert by the presence of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony later in the program; I had never even heard of the young soloist scheduled to play in the violin concerto. Boy, was I in for a surprise, and so was everyone else. Jackiw, a tall, willowy young man with beautiful half-Asian features and the aura of listening for instructions from outer space (or from wherever it is that dead composers reside), performed his part with such verve, such delicacy, such feeling for the details and the overall shape of the piece, as well as such truly remarkable technical ability, that the audience burst into applause after the first movement as well as after the Finale. This was not a sign of audience ignorance, as it sometimes is: they all kept appropriately silent in all the other movement breaks of the evening. But this first appearance by the previously unknown soloist was so overwhelming that they — or, I should say, we—could hardly keep our hands in our laps.

He would have won my regard under any circumstances, but my sense of appreciation was augmented by the fact that the rest of the concert into which he had been sandwiched was noticeably unpleasant. We began with a series of Yeats poems set to music by the conductor himself (always, or at least usually, a bad sign); we ended, after the intermission, with the most lackluster, blandly noncommittal performance of the Shostakovich symphony imaginable. Granted, this is a very strange, intentionally unreadable piece of music — unreadable in the way a face is, when it wants to keep its owner’s feelings hidden. But that unreadability turned into downright shallowness and impenetrability in the hands of Pletnev and his Russian National Orchestra, who refused to commit themselves to any kind of coherent interpretation.

Luckily, I had the Jackiw performance to reflect back on as I tried to ignore the jazz-lite sounds emanating from the orchestra during its repeated (and excessive) encores. These curtain-closers, too, were in marked contrast to Jackiw’s own brief encore, a haunting, moving rendition of a Bach Largo that showed he was as good at slow, quiet music as he was at the more virtuosic and excitable outpourings of Tchaikovsky. A rare gem indeed.

—February 22, 2010

 

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Comparative Beethoven

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A fascinating experiment is now underway at Alice Tully Hall. Under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, six different quartet groups have been enlisted to present all of Beethoven’s works for string quartet in the course of a single month. From a listener’s perspective, the point of the exercise is not to evaluate Beethoven—the vote has long been in on that one—but to observe the relative merits of each group’s handling of these ever-surprising masterpieces.

Every one of the six concerts features an early, a middle, and a late quartet (the sixteen string quartets having been bulked out to eighteen not only with a separate performance of the Grosse Fugue, which is standard, but also with a quartet version of the Opus 14, No. 1 piano sonata), so one can assume that some central adjudication took place. I don’t know exactly how much choice each ensemble had over which program it got to play; what I do know is that the order of the programs, and even the order of the pieces within each program, had been set in advance by the long-dead funders of the entire cycle. That is, what we are getting here at Lincoln Center is a version of the “Slee Cycle,” endowed in the 1950s by a Buffalo, New York couple named Frederick and Alice Slee. Their only requirement, apparently, was that the pieces be played in the same order every time—the order they themselves had set—and this is indeed how they have been played at the University of Buffalo every year since 1955.

My first surprise, at the Brentano Quartet’s opening-night performance on February 5th, was to discover that we were going to hear Opus 127 first. This late quartet in E-flat major would be the gem of any evening’s program (some might even consider it the gem of the whole series), and it seemed a bit perverse to open with it. But the Brentanos are well-equipped to cope with the perverse, especially if it’s a choice between that and the conventional. They are probably the most blatantly virtuosic of the six excellent ensembles in the series—their first violinist, in particular, has technical skills of an incredibly high order—and the result is that their interpretations tend to be highly colored and notably theatrical.

This can be just right for certain pieces, as it was for the Razumovsky No. 3, with which the Brentanos closed their program. All three Razumovsky quartets are designed to showcase virtuosity (they were written, after all, for a show-off violinist, the Russian Count Razumovsky), and their beauty lies in their extremity: the quick changes in speed or volume, the sudden unexpected pauses, the melodic switchbacks and diversions. The Alice Tully audience roared its approval after the Brentanos’ show-stopping performance, and it became clear at that point how well-suited they were to an opening-night program that put this piece last.

But that rousing conclusion also clarified, for me, what had been wrong with their rendition of Opus 127. They had played this subtle, delicate, immensely moving quartet as if it were a Razumovsky. By exaggerating the pauses, introducing sudden dynamic shifts, and emphasizing odd notes in a given passage, they gave it a colorful theatricality that was exactly wrong for it. If you love the Opus 127 quartet, then one of the things you most love—no, let me drop this pose of benevolent authority—one of the things I most love is that cascading downward series, that waterfall of thirty-six consecutive sixteenth notes, with which Beethoven slides us into the close of the Finale. Up until then, the whole final movement has been a series of repeated but slightly varied pleasures of a reassuring, almost triumphant nature; at their culmination, which takes place just before this moment, we are lifted up to ethereal levels by the very highest, sweetest notes of the violin. And then we plunge down that cascade, and it’s as if we’re in free-fall—but the free-fall of a dream, where we are perfectly safe from harm even as we are enchanted by the thrill of flying.

In order to feel this lovely motion, or emotion, you have to sense the separate, equal weight of each one of those sixteenth notes. And that is what the Brentanos deprived us of. They played the whole sequence in a terrible rush, as if it were a flourish or a trill—as if speed itself were a virtue. It can be a virtue, and when it is, the Brentanos are the best in the game at it. But on Opus 127, it was a mistake.

Perhaps this explains why I found the second concert in the series, the February 7th performance by the Daedalus Quartet, so calmly satisfying. As they progressed through their more sensibly arranged program, the Daedalus players just got better and better. They were strong, if a bit rough at times, in the “Harp” quartet, with which they opened; they performed Opus 18, No. 2 with consummate skill; and their rendering of the late, great Opus 131 was stupendous. This astonishing C-sharp minor quartet is the one that many people—myself, I suppose, included—would consider the pinnacle of the whole series, and the Daedalus Quartet did it full justice. The four players disappeared into the music: we could practically see the work’s complicated structure taking place before our very eyes, and the emphatic, repeated chords that swept us movingly through the final Allegro were done with both verve and stateliness. This was ensemble playing at its best, and Beethoven at hisbest.

The CMSLC Beethoven series continues through February, and audiences in the New York area have four more opportunities to hear a range of fine players: the Borromeo Quartet on February 9th, the Pacifica Quartet on February 19th, the St. Lawrence String Quartet on February 21st, and the Miró Quartet on February 23rd. Those of you who already know the quartets well and cherish your favorite recordings can indulge, if you wish, in this entertaining game of comparisons. And those who are new to the Beethoven string quartets can have something even better: the irreplaceable thrill of first hearing these grand masterpieces played live.

***

Since I am writing for the first time about concerts in the recently renovated Alice Tully Hall, I should say a word about the remodeling, which was completed almost exactly a year ago. In a word: it’s terrific. Inside the auditorium, the whole atmosphere is warm and gently enveloping, from the LED lights that glow softly behind the rich-hued wood to the flexible-sized stage, which can alternately extend out into the audience or retract to a narrower strip. In the orchestra section, there are now no bad seats: the graciously wide passages that separated the rows are still there, the acoustical dead spots have been eliminated, and the sightlines are great all the way to the back. I am less enthusiastic about the balcony seats—they feel a bit like Siberia, in terms of both temperature and distance from the stage—but this problem can no doubt be partially rectified with a thermostat adjustment. Certain oddities occur here and there (one step on the orchestra’s lefthand aisle, for instance, is a fraction of an inch higher than its neighbors, so people come close to tripping when they go down it: you can hear the repeated thump if you are sitting nearby), but these flaws are minor compared to the overall success of the design. It is now the perfect setting in which to hear string quartets. And the glass-walled lobby, with its dawn-to-dusk café, is a tremendous new urban amenity. Like the wonderful High Line, which is also a Diller Scofidio + Renfro achievement, the Alice Tully café is one of those great public spaces that enhances its whole neighborhood, blending participatory street life with comfortable seclusion in a way that no one could have predicted until it was an accomplished fact. Bravo!

—February 8, 2010

 

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But Is It Opera?

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

This question was raised, in my own mind and that of several other audience members I spoke to, by the Metropolitan Opera’s admittedly terrific new production of Leos Janacek’s last operatic work, From the House of the Dead. Based on the Dostoyevsky novel about a nineteenth-century Russian prison settlement, the Janacek version retains the period characters (a nobleman, a bunch of peasants, a dishonored village girl, the requisite brutal guards) while suggesting that the prison in question is also, or instead, one of Stalin’s gulags. The situation, at least as portrayed in the synopsis, is designed to wring our hearts and unsettle our minds. And yet the potentially powerful emotions failed to emerge in performance: the libretto’s series of singing heads, each telling his own sorry tale of wrongful imprisonment or criminal guilt, never really coalesced into individual characters for whom we could feel any pity or terror.

Everything about the production itself was topnotch. Patrice Chereau’s direction was both brilliantly inventive and tactfully understated. His bestcoups de theatre—a falling cloud of rubble and garbage which was then picked up, piece by piece, by the characters onstage; a play-within-a-play performed by the inmates for each other, so that an audience on bleachers faced and mirrored us—were balanced by the stark attention he accorded to each soloist, the sense of the utter necessity of every action or prop he put onstage. Richard Perduzzi’s abstract set design complemented the direction beautifully, and so did the blessedly legible translation that was projected directly onto the walls of the set, rather than occupying its usual seat-back position. (Please, please, can we have projected supertitles become the Met standard? They are already the norm in San Francisco, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and other opera centers, and they work so much better than those horrible little seat-back screens.) Janacek’s music, which was fantastic, was fully brought to life by the marvelous conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who carried out his Met debut in a most commendably modest manner: he actually sneaked onto the podium before the opera started and just started right in with the music, eliminating the conventional moment of pre-opera applause. And the singing, from beginning to end, was excellent, especially on the part of Willard White (as the nobleman), Stefan Margita (as a disguised criminal), and, above all, Peter Mattei (as a pathetic wife-murderer). But even Mattei’s long and beautifully done solo, which combined acting, singing, and magnificent stage presence in the way this galvanizing performer always does, was not enough to raise his character to life—mainly because there was no character there to begin with.

The fault may lie partly with the novel, but other wordy Dostoyevsky texts have made it safely into operatic form (I’m thinking in particular of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, which the Met presented in a very exciting Gergiev-conducted production a few seasons ago), so I’m more inclined to think that something crucial was lost in the transition. It was the setting, I imagine, that captured Janacek’s imagination, so that even for him the characters may well have been secondary. One sees why he wanted to write this score: it’s an amazing piece of music, complete with rattling chains, mournful instrumental solos, and abrupt, scary silences. But I wish he had categorized it as an orchestral piece, or even an oratorio, rather than an opera. To give it a fullscale operatic production, as the Met has done—and the best possible production, at that—only underlines its shortcomings as a dramatic work for the stage.

That awareness did not really gel, for me, until I attended the Met’s nearly new version of Puccini’s Il Trittico about a week after the Janacek. This was the second time I had been to the Jack O’Brien production (it premiered at the Met in 2007), and I don’t even normally like Puccini. In this case, though, I have to acknowledge that the guy definitely knew how to write an opera. And not just one opera: three complete, individual operas get squished into this massive four-hour evening, and none of them is the worse for the compression. So there goes the excuse that Janacek had only ninety minutes to tell his tale in From the House of the Dead, since Puccini repeatedly managed to pack an emotional wallop into two-thirds that length. I myself could have done without the Suor Angelica segment (I can always do without religious stories about nuns who fear for their immortal souls), but the woman next to me was weeping profusely throughout it; and everyone in my row was drying her eyes, or at the very least catching his breath, after the amazingly gripping melodrama of Il Tabarro. The real surprise, though, was the final opera, Gianni Schicchi, which was truly funny in the way a well-done Molière or Ben Jonson comedy can be. (Like The Imaginary Invalid orVolpone, this plot hinges on greedy relatives around a deathbed, only in this case—and perhaps this is the sardonic Italian touch—the rich man is already dead.)

As with the Janacek, the Il Trittico production was outstanding, and the singing was truly remarkable—not only from Patricia Racette, who played the lead in all three works, but even more so from the always-astonishing Stephanie Blythe, who took three smaller roles. The sets, too, were admirable, if so outlandishly complicated that they required half-hour intervals for set-changing purposes. The whole evening, in fact, was over the top (literally so in the case of the final opera, where the entire massive set rolled downward to reveal another complete set above it). But none of this would have mattered if Puccini hadn’t done his job beforehand. He put the emotion in—along with its objective correlative, the music—and then we took it out. That’s all. It seems so simple, and yet it hardly ever happens.

—December 9, 2009

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