{"id":95,"date":"2009-12-09T17:09:35","date_gmt":"2009-12-10T00:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2013-07-12T17:09:55","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T00:09:55","slug":"but-is-it-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/but-is-it-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"But Is It Opera?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This question was raised, in my own mind and that of several other audience members I spoke to, by the\u00a0Metropolitan Opera<\/a>\u2019s admittedly terrific new production of Leos Janacek\u2019s last operatic work,\u00a0From the House of the Dead<\/em>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Everything about the production itself was topnotch. Patrice Chereau\u2019s direction was both brilliantly inventive and tactfully understated. His bestcoups de theatre<\/em>\u2014a 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\u2014were balanced by the stark attention he accorded to each soloist, the sense of the utter\u00a0necessity<\/em> of every action or prop he put onstage. Richard Perduzzi\u2019s 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,\u00a0please<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014mainly because there was no character there to begin with.<\/p>\n

The fault may lie partly with the novel, but other wordy Dostoyevsky texts have made it safely into operatic form (I\u2019m thinking in particular of Prokofiev\u2019s\u00a0The Gambler<\/em>, which the Met presented in a very exciting Gergiev-conducted production a few seasons ago), so I\u2019m more inclined to think that something crucial was lost in the transition. It was the setting, I imagine, that captured Janacek\u2019s imagination, so that even for him the characters may well have been secondary. One sees why he wanted to write this score: it\u2019s 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\u2014and the best possible production, at that\u2014only underlines its shortcomings as a dramatic work for the stage.<\/p>\n

That awareness did not really gel, for me, until I attended the Met\u2019s nearly new version of Puccini\u2019s\u00a0Il Trittico<\/em> about a week after the Janacek. This was the second time I had been to the Jack O\u2019Brien production (it premiered at the Met in 2007), and I don\u2019t even normally\u00a0like<\/em> 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\u00a0From the House of the Dead<\/em>, since Puccini repeatedly managed to pack an emotional wallop into two-thirds that length. I myself could have done without the\u00a0Suor Angelica<\/em> 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\u00a0Il Tabarro<\/em>. The real surprise, though, was the final opera,\u00a0Gianni Schicchi<\/em>, which was truly funny in the way a well-done Moli\u00e8re or Ben Jonson comedy can be. (Like\u00a0The Imaginary Invalid<\/em> orVolpone<\/em>, this plot hinges on greedy relatives around a deathbed, only in this case\u2014and perhaps this is the sardonic Italian touch\u2014the rich man is already dead.)<\/p>\n

As with the Janacek, the\u00a0Il Trittico<\/em> production was outstanding, and the singing was truly remarkable\u2014not 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\u2019t done his job beforehand. He put the emotion in\u2014along with its objective correlative, the music\u2014and then we took it out. That\u2019s all. It seems so simple, and yet it hardly ever happens.<\/p>\n

\u2014December 9, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This question was raised, in my own mind and that of several other audience members I spoke to, by the\u00a0Metropolitan Opera\u2019s admittedly terrific new production of Leos Janacek\u2019s last operatic work,\u00a0From the House of the Dead. Based on the Dostoyevsky … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[30,32,29,13,31],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-from-the-house-of-the-dead","tag-il-trittico","tag-janacek","tag-metropolitan-opera","tag-puccini"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}