Rodelinda,
Metropolitan Opera House,
Fall 2004.
Rodelinda,
San Francisco Opera House,
Fall 2005.
As if to set up the perfect experiment, two major American opera companies have recently mounted their own productions of Handel’s 1725 work Rodelinda. One would have to call the Metropolitan Opera’s production the “control” version, with its standard eighteenth-century costuming, its staid, palatial sets, and its star-studded casting. And that makes San Francisco’s noirish, cinematic version (a co-production with the Bayerische Staatsoper of Munich) the “experimental” one.
But to rest comfortably with these labels is to give in to the very conditions that produced the rather dull New York performances, for Handel cannot be done conservatively these days if he is to be done well at all. It takes the kind of reinvention we saw in San Francisco to bring us back into an original relation to his work—not the original relation, because we cannot send ourselves back to the eighteenth century, but an original relation that makes it possibly for us to absorb him freshly and completely. When a Handel opera is treated like a museum piece, the production falls stillborn into the pit. It may sound all right, perhaps, but if that is why you go to the opera, you might as well sit at home and listen to your recordings.
This may be especially true for Handel, but I think it also applies to opera in general. Because it addresses more of our senses than any other art form, and because it really only exists as a live production, opera has a certain obligation toward wholeness, or everythingness, that other art forms do not have. A good opera does not have to take place in a large space, or with a vast array of instruments and singers (one of the best Così Fan Tuttes I ever saw, for instance, featured two pianos and a six-person all-male cast performing in a hundred-seat upstairs box of a theater), but it does need to have a wider focus than, say, a sonnet, or a small black-and-white photo, or a Glenn Gould recording of Bach, or a monologue by Samuel Beckett. Those kinds of artworks make their impact through the intensity of their extremely tight focus; they condense experience down into something we can all absorb together, at once, with our heads facing exactly the same way. Opera has more in common with what Auden was talking about in “Musée de Beaux Arts”: like Breughel’s great paintings, opera encourages us to glance into the obscure corners when something else is taking place on the main stage. We in the audience need to be able to choose what to look at in the opera, just as we do with dance (which is why neither form survives well on videotape). Because nobody can simultaneously get the big picture and absorb all the details, opera demands that we constantly shift our attention between wide focus and narrow, between wholeness and bits. Sitting there in the audience, we each take in our own sifted version of the entire performance.
But this only works if we are making our selections within a production that has itself been completely thought out. Our individual side-glances may be arbitrary and idiosyncratic, but the production as a whole must consist of things that feel necessary, if all the things we notice are to add up. There has to be a reason why we are seeing what we are seeing, hearing what we are hearing, feeling what we are feeling—even if that reason is, and remains, inaccessible to us. A good opera needs to answer the questions that we are unconsciously bringing to it, with our minds and with our senses. And to do this, it must be shaped by highly conscious choices on the part of its makers.
That’s why a “standard” production of Rodelinda like the one at the Metropolitan Opera last year represents a certain degree of shirked responsibility. It presumes that the design and directing process can all take place on automatic pilot, as long as the playing and singing are good enough. Eighteenth-century costumes and palatial sets are deemed, in this view, to fade into the woodwork—they do not call attention to themselves and therefore leave us free to enjoy the “pure” opera. But an eighteenth-century gown does not mean the same thing now that it did in 1725. To our twenty-first-century eye, all those frills and furbelows connote Masterpiece Theatre, or some equally middlebrow piece of programming centered on faraway, long-ago aristocrats. Such costuming, in other words, is the very opposite of transparent. It places a firm mental barrier (“historic drama, probably made for non-commercial TV”) between the audience and the characters in the opera. It reduces the performance to Art—safely other, safely onstage, safely appreciable for its melodic virtuosities alone.
Perhaps a more serious concern, though, is that such a production does not answer many of the problems and questions raised by the opera itself. All stageworthy works have elements that make them less than fully stageworthy, and the farther away we get from them in time, the more these elements are likely to stand out. In Handel’s Rodelinda, some of these problems are: 1) it goes on for four hours; 2) there is only one duet midway through the performance, and one brief finale for multiple voices—otherwise the whole opera consists of one voice singing at a time; 3) each of the arias involves several identical or near-identical repetitions of the words and music, further slowing down any sense of forward movement; 4) the two main villains, Grimoaldo and Garibaldo, have extremely similar names; 5) the opera, somewhere between Act Two and Act Three, completely and inexplicably changes its spots, moving from the darkest tragedy to a near-comic resolution. And as if all this weren’t enough, there is the fact that two of the male leads—the deposed King Bertarido, husband of Rodelinda, and his loyal sidekick Unolfo—are both countertenors: a lovely sound, but not one that we are currently used to hearing from our leading men.
The Metropolitan production handled all these problems by ignoring them, and the result was an extremely long four hours. Having seen only that production of Rodelinda, I thought the boredom was inherent in the opera itself, and it was only idle curiosity, mixed with a deep and abiding love for Handel’s music, that got me to the San Francisco production. Imagine my surprise, then, at finding myself gripped from start to finish, barely able to blink for fear of missing something onstage, and as moved by the singing as I have ever been at the opera.
The makers of the San Francisco Rodelinda (who included the director David Alden, the set designer Paul Steinberg, the costume designer Buki Shiff, and the lighting designer Pat Collins) have squarely faced each of the “problems” I mentioned earlier. In doing so, they have released the opera from its temporal trap—not by talking down to us or converting serious, useful difficulties into digestible pap, but, on the contrary, by respecting the broad and multifaceted intelligence of the audience. What kind of performance, they have asked, features characters speaking one at a time, rather than in chorus? Why, a movie, of course. So from the opening scene—when Rodelinda and her little son flatten themselves against a tall, window-lined wall, attempting to evade the nefarious figures who are sneaking along the ledge outside that wall—we find ourselves in the world of film noir: a bigger-than-life, darkly lit rectangle in which frightening events are obscurely taking place. This is not just any noir, though, but a peculiar combination of Cagney-era Little Italy and De Chirico- era fascist Italy. The second scene, for instance, is dominated by an imposing perspective of monumental statues, ranged in a triangular space that is defined on the two receding sides by enormous shadow-lit buildings; from one of the highest windows, the usurper, King Grimoaldo, waves at us in Il Duce fashion.
This dreamlike mixture, of America’s movie gangsters and Italy’s political monsters, carries through the whole opera, informing the costumes (slinky glitter and mournful black for the women, 1940s suits and hats for most of the men) as well as the gestures (a lot of nightclub-style dance moves, and even a body thrown into a car trunk). Lest all of this sound mildly silly, let me hasten to add that the utter seriousness with which it is done makes it all work perfectly. Yet even that seriousness is intercut with something else: not irony, not pastiche, but a certain lightness of tone that one finds in those same bad-guy movies (I’m thinking, say, of the wryly inflected dialogue between Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place). And this cinematic perspective helps makes sense of things in the opera that would otherwise not make sense. The sudden third-act transformation of Bertarido’s sister Eduige, for instance—an inexplicable figure in most productions, since she goes from ruthlessly pursuing marriage with Grimoaldo to helping her brother escape his clutches—becomes understandable when she is based, as she is here, on the kind of nympho-alky rich girl usually played by Dorothy Malone. And even Grimoaldo’s switch from evil tyrant to grateful subject is foreshadowed by a certain lack of seriousness—let us say, a certain dandyish playfulness—in his desire to be a bad guy.
Every detail of the San Francisco production has been thought through. Take, for example, what has been done with the men’s hats. With a single exception, the men in this production are all costumed like the gangsters in old French or American movies—or, to give a real-life example, like the wiseguys Weegee was always hoping to capture on film just after they’d been shot dead (“Some day I’ll follow one of these guys with a ‘pearl gray hat,’ have my camera all set and get the actual killing”). Even the supernumeraries are costumed in this way, lending a sense that there is a much more massive gang of criminals beyond the few visible onstage, ready to rush in from the wings should any further punishment be necessary. So the hats seem at first to represent threat. But they are actually merely the threat of threat, the appearance of violent strength. The only character who is deeply, thoroughly frightening, Garibaldo (played with true ominousness by the Italian bass-baritone Umberto Chiummo), never wears a hat. His boss, Grimoaldo, toys with hatlessness during the first scene, and at that point we think he’s just engaged in a slightly silly piece of vanity-indulging stage business. Only later do we realize how sharply those seemingly trivial gestures have outlined his character—as the relatively weak man who wants the dirty business done, but wants someone else to do it for him. Rodelinda uses precisely this aspect of Grimoaldo’s character against him when she insists that if he wants to marry her, he will first need to stab her son to death in front of her eyes. It is particularly telling that Grimoaldo, having been handed the knife by Rodelinda, distastefully passes it over to Garibaldo before embarking on his answering aria.
But hatlessness does not just represent naked threat in this production; it stands for truthful exposure in general. All the main characters (except Garibaldo) first enter the stage with some kind of head covering—a black scarf in the case of Rodelinda, a pillbox hat for Eduige, and the standard pearl gray hat for all the men. They are all, in this respect, in disguise. Only Garibaldo is truly himself throughout—nakedly violent, nakedly self-serving from beginning to end. And only Garibaldo suffers the consequence of being killed before the end of the opera; the others survive, happy and hatless, reformed or saved, as the case may be.
The hats are also connected to another aspect of the production, which is its use of dance and movement to define character. After all, the most famous hat-wearing actor of the gangster period was James Cagney, and he was also, notably, a hoofer. Grimoaldo even does a little soft-shoe routine at the height of his self-satisfaction, as if he were actually trying to turn himself into Cagney, and there are echoes of Cagney style in the gestures of many of the other actor-singers onstage. But movement is used, in this production, as more than just an allusion to film. The contrast between those who move gracefully and those who move awkwardly essentially defines the difference between the purely serious and the slightly comic roles. The two leads, Rodelinda and Bertarido, are always graceful, even when they are lying in despair on the floor, and Garibaldo, too, moves with beautiful, slinky grace. Grimoaldo wants to be graceful, and sometimes manages it, but it doesn’t seem to come naturally to him; he is the bridging figure between the two categories. And Eduige and Unolfo are both outright klutzes, from their first scenes onstage: she struggling to climb backwards through a window, he wrestling helplessly with his sound equipment (he doubles as a reporter, which is how he is able to be the deposed Bertarido’s eyes-and-ears in the usurping Grimoaldo’s court). At first these intrusions of physical near-comedy seem very odd, amid the serious singing that is going on all around them. Only in Act Three, when the opera changes from a tragedy to a comedy mainly through the intervention of Unolfo and Eduige, do we see what those characters were preparing us for. In the Met production, the transition was abrupt and inexplicable, as if to say, “Well, Handel wrote it this way, so we’re stuck with it.” But in the San Francisco production someone bothered to think about why Handel wrote it this way, and to lay the groundwork from the beginning.
If it is important that we be able to sympathize with the central figures in this opera, it is also important that we recognize their essential theatricality—and this is where the 1940s-style, movie-style design really earns its keep. That period is near enough so we can see the characters as having emotions similar to ours, but far away enough, and also artificial enough, so that we do not expect them to behave in a documentary-realism fashion. The noir style has its own extremes of beauty-in-darkness that are equivalent, in their way, to the tender notes of a counter-tenor hero. (Think of the way the klieg lighting, for instance, plays across the planes of Gloria Grahame’s face: this is not something that ever happens in real life, but it is no less affecting for all that.) Noir is, after all, only a step away from outright Expressionism.
The San Francisco production takes that step in the last act of its Rodelinda, giving us a set that is literally cockeyed to go with the cockeyed resolution of the drama. When the backdrop lifts to reveal the final scene of the opera, we see a vast, vertiginously tilted brick wall that is spotlit around its single open window, high above the stage. In the window, alone, stands Grimoaldo, in a placement that recalls his earlier Il Duce appearance, though this time with the opposite effect. As he sings his heart out from this clearly perilous position, the whole wall moves toward us, as in a movie’s slow-zoom shot, so that we almost seem to approach him rather than vice versa. It is a masterful piece of artifice as well as a terrifying bit of stage-work, because Grimoaldo and Garibaldo must then act out their final death-struggle in this dangerously high window. The fact that there is something intensely visual to focus on during this scene means that the sung repetitions are suspenseful rather than merely tedious—and indeed, that has been the method throughout the opera: to give us something narratively meaningful to focus on during the otherwise potentially pointless repeats.
Of course, any opera production must finally depend at least partly on the quality of its singing. Both the Met version and the San Francisco one featured stars, and in fact they both featured the same star—David Daniels—as Bertarido. Having heard him twice in the role now, I am tempted to say that there is no point in doing Rodelinda without him. He is simply the best there is, and the voice alone is remarkable. But whereas the Met used only the voice, San Francisco used everything Daniels has to offer, including a strong, sweet stage presence, remarkable physical grace, and even the ability to project excellently from a prone position.
The true difference in the singing, however, lay in the choice of Rodelin-das. At the Met we had Renée Fleming, a big-name diva with an undeniably lovely voice, and a very pretty woman to boot. But she was all wrong for Rodelinda, not just physically (her prettiness is not really the tragic-regal sort) but also vocally. Fleming is one of those singers who seem to feel that the Handel line is too plain unless you add a lot of ornamentation to it—and this, to true Handel fanatics, is one of the most annoying things a singer can do. I own two recordings of Handel’s Alcina, one with Renée Fleming in the title role and one with Joan Sutherland; and though the Sutherland version is much older and has some casting idiosyncrasies (a tenor, for instance, substituted for what should be a soprano-in-pants), I vastly prefer it to the newer recording, not only because Sutherland herself is so good, but because I can’t stand the way Fleming goops up the melodic line. Not much to my surprise, she did the same thing in the Met’s Rodelinda.
San Francisco Opera gave us instead the wonderful Catherine Naglestad, who performed so beautifully as Alcina three seasons ago. I don’t think there is a better Handel soprano around. It’s not just that her voice is pure and strong, but that she can also really act the very difficult, tortured, ambivalent parts of Handel heroines. She too, like David Daniels, can sing terrifically while crumpled on the floor, and she too can move with enormous grace. She was perfect for this production because her face even managed to radiate the kind of luminous, profound sadness one finds in film noir heroines. But then, she was perfect as Alcina as well, and that production was governed by an entirely different (though equally intelligent) aesthetic.
Three years ago, I celebrated that production of Alcina in these pages, and in doing so celebrated the appointment of Pamela Rosenberg as general director of the San Francisco Opera. Now I am faced with the sad fact that this Rodelinda is part of her final season. Opera is a collaborative art, of course, and no one person can make a production work. Still, for people like me—people who long to see their beloved composers brought to life by smart, theatrical, moving productions—she has made all the difference in the world. But now we are losing her to Berlin, and San Francisco’s brief golden age of opera is, I fear, nearing its end. We shall not soon see its like again.
Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, is a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers this year. Her latest book is a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden.
