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Alcina,
San Francisco Opera House,
November-December 2002.

For many years, the San Francisco Opera was run by people who despised strong directing. In their view, a director only interfered with the relationship between singer and audience. They thought it best just to wheel on the world-class singers, plant them firmly in front of some elegantly operatic and generally meaningless scenery, and let the audience listen to the music. If those administrators could have dispensed with artistic direction entirely, they would have, and in fact the original directors of productions were rarely invited back to supervise revivals in San Francisco; instead, the old costumes and sets were simply hauled out, as if that were all that mattered. So we had many productions that were lovely to listen to but excruciatingly boring and sometimes downright infuriating to watch. The connection between opera and theater, in those days, was almost entirely severed.

Pamela Rosenberg has changed all that. Within less than two years of taking on the job of General Director, she has produced a season of such intense theatricality that few who were present will ever forget it. For me, the most thrilling production was Handel’s Alcina, which Rosenberg imported from her previous company, the Stuttgart Opera. This Alcina was not only the best thing I’ve ever seen on the stage of the San Francisco Opera House; it was also one of the five or six performances that I will carry with me forever as examples of how theater, at its best, can work. The singing was terrific—Catherine Naglestad, who played Alcina, was astonishing, and the supporting cast verged on being equally wonderful—but what made this opera truly compelling was the stage direction (in which category I include set design, costuming, lighting, and all those other elements that go into a finished production). And of course part of what was good about the singing was also due to the direction: since these performers were obliged to act as well as sing, their renditions were dramatic without being self-dramatizing—were, in some way, closer to being naturalistic than what we usually find in that unnatural form called opera.

Critics who hate strong directing often seize on the idea of a “concept” as their straw man. This concept, usually underlined with the disparaging adjective “intellectual,” is seen as something that the director wilfully and unpleasantly imposes on a production. The poor actor-singers and writer-librettists are impressed into its service, reduced to mere slaves of a harsh dictatorship that has no regard for the artwork in its original, “pure” form.

Of course, you can’t put a bare libretto and score onstage and call it opera; you have to do something to make it stageworthy, even if it’s only to cast the singers and choose the scenery. (And you can’t not choose: absence of scenery is itself scenery, as Beckett’s plays have shown us.) It helps if, when you’re making these choices, you have some idea of why you’re making them. A concept, in its best form, need not be something that twists and distorts. It can emerge from the artwork, from the director’s close and scrupulous reading of and thinking about and listening to that artwork over time. And in this ideal case, the thought behind the production will not force itself on us as a separate idea, but will instead feel fully integrated with the work. Such a concept will show us things we might never have bothered to look for on our own, but that turned out to be there all along. When we see a production that has this thought-through quality at every moment of its performance, we feel—or I do, at any rate—that it is a definitive production of the work. Not the definitive production, maybe, but one that can never be bettered. I felt this with Alcina.

Before I go into detail about why I felt that way, let me suggest some of the questions that a director of a work like Alcina needs to ask himself. (I say “himself” because the two directors of this production, Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, were men. But the set and costume designer, who was at least as important to the directorial team, was a woman, Anna Viebrock—and in any event the choice of gender pronoun is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, as Alcina amply demonstrates in both plot and performance.)

The director must ask, to begin with, where these events are taking place. In a realistic setting? A fantastical one? In the case of Alcina, should the set be a literal rendering of an “enchanted island,” or a metaphorical or imagined version of it? Since opera is so patently anti-realistic, it offers a certain inherent license to move away from the literal, especially when the plot of the opera is itself based on myth and poetry, as this one is. (The source is apparently Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Alcina, a sorceress, lives on an island with her sister, Morgana, and Morgana’s longtime lover, Oronte. A version of Circe, Alcina seduces one man after another, turning her discarded lovers into beasts and rocks and streams. But now she has fallen in love with Ruggiero, her latest consort, so when he returns to his original fiancée, Bradamante—who has come to the island in order to win him back-Alcina’s heart breaks.)

And how about the audience’s perspective? Are we among those enchanted by the island’s magic, or is it part of some dream of ours, or do we stand completely outside the system? What is this opera’s relationship to us—not to some generic audience, not necessarily even to its own original audience, but to the very specific people who are watching it now, several centuries after it was composed? How can the conventional elements of the piece (high-voiced roles for male characters, cross-dressing disguises) be made meaningful, so that we feel them to be newly credible rather than archaically contrived? How can we be brought to care about these characters as characters? Which of them are we likely to feel sympathy for, and do these sympathies conflict? If so, how can the conflicts be resolved—or should they pointedly not be resolved? And how does the music fit into all this? If the musical structure is stately and repetitive—as, in Handel, it often is—how are those qualities to be played against the necessity for dramatic interest presented by the plot, which involves (among other things) a man torn between two women? What, in short, are all the other people doing onstage when only one character is singing? And what might she be doing besides singing?

There is always something, and usually more than one thing, to watch in this Alcina. The visual interest begins even before the curtain rises, when those looking toward the stage may notice that the musicians have been taken out of the pit and raised up to the level of the orchestra seats. I say “may notice” because the transformation has been accomplished so cunningly, with old-style wooden panels framing the players in their chairs, that it almost looks as if the San Francisco Opera House has always been that way. But the conversion to an eighteenth-century intimate theater is part of this production’s very self-conscious artifice, as well as part of its naked honesty (in that it shows us something that is usually hidden, the source of the opera’s music).

Artifice and nakedness are two of the poles around which the entire production revolves. They are not necessarily oppositions: people may be at their most seductive, and therefore their most deceitful, when they are taking off their clothes. But undressing can also be a form of self-revelation. In this version of the opera, the characters tend to tear off their outermost garments, and sometimes much more, when they are in states of heightened distress.

Alcina herself has at least eight or nine costume changes in the course of the performance, and they increase in frequency during the opera’s second half, as her emotional state becomes more frantic. In one relatively late scene, she examines and then throws away five little black cocktail dresses (like all the clothes in this production, hers are modern dress), only to choose a sixth, which she then dons onstage, helped and partially hidden by her sister Morgana, who buttons her up as Alcina continues to sing her heart out. Toward the end of the final act, she leaves the stage while her traitorous lover Ruggiero is singing an intensely affecting aria and comes back on wearing a different outfit, all within the compass of a single song. And throughout the opera, each of her little black dresses partakes of both disguise and revelation: the fabric is draped diagonally, so the left side looks slightly different from the right; or the top is delicately and only intermittently transparent; or a slice of skin appears briefly when she turns in a particular direction. From our point of view, Alcina’s costumes are the clearest evidence we have of her magical transformations.

A more comic version of undressing takes place early in the opera, when Oronte, Morgana’s lover, complains to Ruggiero about the faithlessness of women. Oronte is upset because Morgana has fallen in love with someone else; Ruggiero, however, is still confidently basking in his sensuous enthrallment to Alcina, who is equally enthralled with him, so he finds the idea of jealousy somewhat ridiculous. (As, indeed, it almost always seems from the outside.) “Simpleton, you trust a woman?” Oronte sings. “When she looks at you and sighs, do not forget: she is still capable of deceit.” The music of his aria is lively and lovely, but the few phrases repeat themselves over and over, so it could well seem a bit tedious if sung straight. Instead, Oronte (charmingly embodied by Toby Spence) gradually proceeds to disrobe—at first angrily tearing off his jacket and tie, but then, with a glimmer of a wicked smile, unloosing his ponytail, shaking out his long hair, and slowly unzipping his trousers. These come off with the flick of a balletic leg, and soon he is cozying up to the slightly-taken-aback Ruggiero, peeling off each of his socks and dangling them in front of Ruggiero’s nose even as he continues to sing. Oronte’s final note is accompanied by a frankly sexual gesture, which is rejected with thorough good humor. Whether we (and Ruggiero) are meant to take the pass seriously, or whether it is simply Oronte’s answer to Ruggiero’s jokingly seductive fondling of him in the previous scene, is left entirely open; in either case, it accords nicely with the incandescent, sexually omnivorous mood of Part One. (Wieler and Morabito have divided Handel’s original three acts into a warmly lit Part One and and bleaker, sadder, fluorescently lit Part Two, a move for which the music gives them ample authority.)

Oronte’s song and its striptease would have plenty of meaning if performed by one male lead to another: we can’t trust women, let’s try to do without them, etc. But in fact the situation is more complicated than that, for Ruggiero is a man played by a woman. Yet this is one of those rare cases where a mezzo-soprano—the marvelous Alice Coote—is utterly credible as a boyish man: she walks like a man, stands and sits like a man, kisses women like a man, and pushes her floppy hair back from her forehead like a man, so that I found myself thinking of her as “him” all throughout the opera, even during the curtain call. The rival who has roused Oronte’s jealousy by attracting Morgana’s love is also a man sung by a woman, but this “Ricciardo” is actually the female character Bradamante—touchingly performed by Helene Schneiderman—who has disguised herself as her twin brother in order to win back the love of her faithless fiancé, Ruggiero. (You can see why it’s best to read the synopsis before watching this opera; supertitles alone cannot illuminate such complexities.) Though they are both mezzos dressed in suits, Schneiderman’s version of a man is very different from Coote’s: less cute, more nerdlike and serious, and at the same time more feminine. So what we have in this opera is not so much a division between male and female as a spectrum that runs from male to female, with lots of possibilities in between. That everybody is always falling in love with inappropriate people forms part of the plot within the opera as well as part of the opera convention we see onstage; the opera’s reality and our reality are bridged by this acknowledgment of sexual confusion.

If you are generally resistant to the preachiness of gender politics, as I am, you may be surprised by how easily this Alcina wins you over. That, I think, is because the production doesn’t have an ounce of preaching. This is not a performance that tells us, “It’s fine to love anyone your heart desires,” or “Love conquers all,” or “Sex is good clean fun”; on the other hand, it also doesn’t tell us that “Duty is the essential element in love” or “Death is more noble than pleasure” or “Seductive women are evil,” or any of the other things the libretto at times seems to be saying. Alcina is one of those beautifully complicated operas in which the mood and the plot increasingly work against each other, so that at the very end, when the surviving characters sing, “What a happy day! All pain is turned to joy and love triumphs in the end,” what we feel instead is an overwhelming sense of loss and longing. Alcina has been eliminated and her victims restored to their original forms—good has apparently triumphed over evil—but all we can recall is how wonderful Alcina was and how much we will miss her power to transform.

This doubleness is inherent in the music (almost all of Alcina’s best singing occurs in the second half, where she has one astounding aria after another), but it has been brought out in this production by the staging, and particularly by the set. There is only one set for the entire three-hour opera, and it is deceptively simple—a single large room papered in deteriorating old paisley wallpaper and dominated by a huge, gold-framed “mirror” (actually an empty space) hanging opposite us. As it happens, Anna Viebrock derived the idea for the set from a real room in an old, run-down theater; the photo she took of that room, with herself reflected in the mirror, decorates the program cover. But even if you did not know this, I think you would sense that there is something explicitly theatrical about the set. To begin with, there is the pile of oddly assorted props in the corner, a pile from which almost everything that is used in the course of the opera—muskets, swords, shoes, curved tusks, a broken-down chair, and so on—gradually emerges. And then there is that mirror. It is not always a mirror. Sometimes it serves as a window through which we can see offstage characters walking and standing, posing for us or oblivious to us. Sometimes it resembles the viewfinder of a camera, revealing a spinning room like the self-transforming 360-degree room in which Jimmy Stewart kisses Kim Novak in Vertigo. Once it even functions as a picture frame, showing us photographs of the future: first Ruggiero’s marriage to Bradamante and then his death in battle (which is also a sort of marriage, with Ruggiero as the veiled bride to masculine duty). Occasionally it reflects the characters who pass by it—notably the powerful Melisso, Bradamante’s tutor and accomplice—but more often it does not. What it does consistently, during the entire opera, is to remind us that there is another realm beyond the one we see onstage, a magical territory that may be nothing more than a distorted reflection of our own reality.

It matters, somehow, that this brilliant metaphor for the whole opera was found rather than invented. It matters that Viebrock saw the room and realized, “This is where Alcina takes place,” rather than dreaming it up wholesale from childhood memories of enchanted attics and fairy-tale mirrors. Perhaps what I mean is that the connection to a felt reality saves the set from being just a clever device—gives it a kind of resistance and inalterability that contribute to its evident dreamlikeness. For it is one of the characteristics of a dream that it is resistant and inalterable; it has its own logic that overrides ours.

That dreamlike sensation comes through most strongly in the staging of the extended scene that ends Part One. The sequence begins with Melisso stepping through the mirror to reach Ruggiero—a shocking moment, because it is the first time (and almost the last) that any character will violate the integrity of that theatrical wall. As one does in dreams, Ruggiero at first mistakes the wizardlike Melisso for his own benevolent tutor, Atlante: “What oracle admonishes me to enlighten my spirit?” he asks wonderingly. But then Melisso’s approach becomes more aggressive. He grabs Ruggiero’s hand, pries it open, and jams an enchantment-ending ring onto one finger. At this, Alcina’s spell is broken, and Ruggiero sings, “Tell Alcina, who betrayed my honor, that I no longer love her.” Melisso, going on the offensive, excoriates Ruggiero for abandoning Bradamante and exhorts him to return to her, which will also mean returning to his responsibilities as a soldier. As Melisso sings (in David Pitt-singer’s emphatic, effective bass voice), he supervises Ruggiero in the execution of an uncannily compelling, utterly irrational test. Various objects—a pair of soldier’s boots, a set of long flat knives, and, strangest of all, a French horn—have been pulled from the props pile and laid out on the floor, and Ruggiero, following Melisso’s gestured commands, repeatedly attempts to rearrange them in some unfathomable pattern. With what end or meaning? How can Ruggiero know when he has done it properly, or even try to do it properly? The whole sequence has the relentlessly illogical logic of a nightmare.

At this point Bradamante comes out and Ruggiero, failing to recognize his fiancée in her male disguise, aims a gun at her and shoots. He misses, and as Bradamante rails at him (“O love, arm my rage”), she tears open her jacket and shirt to show him her woman’s body. They have a brief love scene, but it compares badly to Ruggiero’s earlier love scenes with Alcina, containing as it does far more repentance than eros. Then Bradamante leaves Ruggiero alone onstage.

Filled with touching confusion (“Who can tell me, am I being deceived or am I being told the truth?”), Ruggiero performs his final Part One aria. As he sings about being stirred to tender passion by the sight of his beloved, we see both his beloveds—first Alcina, then Bradamante, then the two of them clasped together—gliding behind the mirror like statues on a revolving strip, at once motionless and moving. Only this time it is Alcina who is uncharacteristically wearing a suit, and Bradamante who is uncharacteristically wearing a black dress. Ruggiero does not seem to see them, but his song acknowledges their presence, and as they glide by him for the last time, they turn from their embrace to look directly at him, piercing through the mirror’s shield just before the curtain comes down and wakes us from the dream.

The French horn of Melisso’s test is like a riddle that haunts our unconscious mind and then, late in Part Two, reappears as its own solution. To create this revelatory scene, Wieler and Morabito have plucked from the orchestra the score’s two designated horns and placed them onstage, with the two musicians reflecting each other in the giant mirror. As Ruggiero sings a strange, alluring aria about a tiger pursued by a hunter, his voice alternates with the music of the horns. (It is during this crucial aria that Alcina leaves the stage for a costume change, returning before the song’s end.) Musically and psychologically, this is Ruggiero’s most intense moment in the half of the opera that is devoted mainly to Alcina; it is what makes the opera feel as if it is about Ruggiero and his unfolding tragedy as much as it is about Alcina and hers. But in fact the two tragedies are not separable, because even though Alcina’s and Ruggiero’s interests have now become opposed, their love (especially Alcina’s, which is stronger) makes them share each other’s viewpoints.

Visually, the scene with the French horns is exactly analogous to this double, both-ways-through-the-looking-glass perspective, this complicated situation of being at once in Alcina’s shoes and in Ruggiero’s. For what you get when you place the two horn-players in parallel positions—both in profile, one behind the mirror and one in front—is not a mirror image but an exact duplication: you can’t, that is, reverse the horn on the far side of the mirror, as the instrument’s distinctive spiral makes obvious. So the golden frame functions simultaneously as a mirror (of the musicians) and not a mirror (of their instruments).

Watching this performance for the first time, I felt that the whole directorial vision had somehow emanated from that moment with the two horns. That doubleness was in the music, and the directors had simply raised it up onstage for emphasis. And then (I imagined) they had worked backward over the production, not only placing the horn itself in a few key scenes, but also finding the other strands of doubleness that run through the opera.

Once located, these oppositions all seem to have the same quality as the two French horns, at once opposites and twins. Alcina herself, for instance, is obviously mirrored by Bradamante, but she is also set off against her own sister, Morgana (whose blonde delicacy, in Catriona Smith’s lovely performance, threatens to fade into the wallpaper, in marked contrast to Catherine Naglestad’s dark beauty). And Ruggiero’s fate is reimagined, in different form, in yet another subplot, this one involving the boy Oberto and his father Astolfo—the former a plaything of Alcina’s whom she tenderly teases, the latter a discarded lover turned into a beast, both of whom eventually turn on her and jointly humiliate her. Ruggiero is also mirrored by the jealous Oronte and, much more darkly, by the potent Melisso: one echoes his life as a pampered lover, the other foretells his stern fate as a dutiful soldier.

The staging takes up each of these pairings in turn, but the point is that they were there anyway. That is the beauty of this production of Alcina. It reveals to us, as if by magic, what lay underneath all along, and at the same time it makes us feel that this three-hundred-year-old opera has only just materialized out of our own disturbing, entrancing interior life.

Wendy Lesser is the editor of The Threepenny Review. She is also the author of six books, the most recent of which, Nothing Remains the Same, is about rereading.