Well, it seems to be a trend—every opera that we’re destined
to see this season at the Metropolitan
Opera’s Live in High Definition is going to have a superb cast, a terrific
chorus, a marvelous orchestra, interesting glimpses of backstage work, and
occasionally revealing and funny interviews with opera stars, who turn out to
be surprising real and interesting people. In short, well, let Jaime tell it…
“I’m thoroughly enjoying myself,” said he, “I get it now,
what you and everybody else have been telling me….”
Listen, even if you have the three hundred bucks or so to
sit in a good seat in the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will it be the same
as seeing it in a movie theater? Can you eat popcorn at the Met? Or drink wine,
as Jaime was doing? Can you see it filmed from different perspectives? And by
the way, I know nothing about film, but the operas feel just the same as a
movie—and well-done ones at that.
So—I have just told the good news.
Thd bad news?
It seems that everything we are going to see is set in the
1930’s.
Right—it may be too early to declare a trend, since it’s
only been two Saturdays—hence two operas—that Mr. Fernández, his mother Ilia,
and I have hopped into a cab and gone to the movies / opera. OK—that “hop” in
the last sentence applies to nobody, since the youngest members of the team are
status post-chikungunya: we creak—at best—into the cab. And Ilia?
Rather a more involved process, which starts when we hail a
cab, arrive to the house, and discover—wait, there’s nothing, or rather no one,
to discover.
The first car drives up behind the cab.
Ilia appears, waves at me, and disappears.
Second car!
Ilia reappears, starts towards me, stops, turns, disappears.
Cars three and four!
Ilia reappears, shawl now over her arm, but without her
cane….
So Ilia is appearing and disappearing with the frequency of
Banquo’s ghost, and with about the same effect, and the cars behind the taxi?
Well, the cars are waiting with perfectly tranquility! The drivers,
however….
So she appears, and stops to kiss Sitara, and pat her cheek,
and tell her, “ay, qué linda, nena!”
and then approaches the gate, to the near-Wagnerian score being playing for her
entrance and hoped-for departure, and then she turns around—AGAIN—to kiss
Sitara and tell her something.
This is all slightly nerve-rattling, since Ilia has severe
arthritis and chikungunya: if that’s not shot with the same gun twice,
what is? So we laboriously have Ilia—less than five feet tall physically,
mile-high determinationally—teetering on the door ledge of the taxi, when she
announces that she needs time to breathe. Logical—since stopping inward and
bending her hip towards the seat and trying not to bash her head—well, all that
takes breath! Who can’t see that?
Well, it’s a male driver, so Ilia, raised in a time of rigid
social code, addresses him thus: “¿Cómo
está usted, señor?” We then drive
five minutes to the theater, during which we chat, and during which the driver has
now become m’hijo, or my son.
OK—that’s the setting, at least for us. But the settings for
the first two operas we have seen?
I can only think that the two directors of the two operas
fall into that category of gentlemen-not-scoring-high-in-the-heterosexuality
department—I’ m a washout there too, so no offense intended—who find the 1930’s
the most glamorous decade of all time. Because why in God’s name would you cast
Macbeth, Shakespeare’s 1608
masterpiece funneled through Verdi, in that decade?
The problem was evident from the beginning, because the
three witches? It turned out to be the entire Met chorus, who occasionally
partitioned themselves in to three sections. Was the sound glorious? Very much
so, but should it have been? And aren’t we talking about a feudal, pre-modern
society? So how can there be thanes in the thirties, to say nothing of England
invading Scotland, which in the 30’s was part of Great Britain? Oh, and then we
have things like Macbeth singing, “hand me my sword!” and what does he get? A
machine gun!
“I think they’re doing this to appeal to younger audiences,
to make it more ‘relevant,’” speculates Ilia. But I tell her—my young
self-defined “Niggah” son has as much idea about the thirties as he does
Scotland in whatever century this is supposed to be set in. So unless you
update to today, and have internal strife within the sub-cells of the
Taliban—well, it’s pointless.
And in fact, updating to today is pointless because Montalvo
has no clue with what’s going on in the world, since he believes in the
Illuminati—that ultra-secret group of extraordinary rich and powerful people
who are poised to take over the world. So the news? Forget it!
What does Montalvo understand? Well, he gets the essential
idea of…OK, which version do you want? His version, referring to Lady Macbeth,
might go something like, “this ball-busting bitch who’s trying to stick it to
her husband….”
Next we come to yesterday’s opera, Nozze di
Figaro, by Mozart, set in the
late 18th century. And where were we again? In Spain, which, said
the director, was rife with class conflict.
Yeah? Well, I agree, but I had to ask Mr. Fernández when the
Spanish Civil War started: he said 1936. OK—I had thought it was earlier, but
anyway, that’s not the point. And what is?
Well, I fled to Wikipedia to get my facts straight—and
what’s happening? The page is taking too long to open, so I’ll wing it, and
hope no one pounces out there….
This is opera bufa,
and that means—I strongly suspect—that someone will be the buffoon. And if the
buffoon happens to be the Count Almaviva, well—isn’t that all the richer? But
what happens when the Count is updated to the 1930’s, but villagers are all
singing praise to him for abolishing the feudal practice of allowing the Count
enjoy every bride—yes, in that way—before the husband does?
More to the point, one of the crucial figures is the
Countess, who knows her husband is unfaithful, loves him still, is tormented by
whether he is plotting an affair with her maid, the soon-to-be bride of Figaro.
And a lot of the tension in the part arises from the chasm between social
classes: reduce the chasm, reduce the tension.
“I think they’re doing it to save money on costumes,”
reported Ilia, who has now been hoisted / heaved into her second taxi of the
day, and is now busy chatting with Tisiana, the five-year old daughter of the
female driver.
“I love female taxi drivers,” says Ilia, and it must
be true, because Ilia has hopped directly into the informal, calling the
driver, “mamita” and then quizzing
Tisiana about the name of her school. This Tisiana is unable to provide, since
she goes with her mother and her elder: they’re in charge of such affairs.
“No, no, m’hija,” says
Ilia, who stopped being a social worker some decades and who also didn’t. So
she is telling Tisiana that she has to know the name of her school—“always find
out for yourself, m’hija—never rely on anyone else! That’s what I learned when
I was your age, and here I am….” So this lesson has to be reinforced, which is
why Ilia brings out a dollar bill and passes it to Tisiana.
“Well, we’ll have to wait and see what happens to
Carmen—referring to, well, yes, Carmen, but the Carmen of the opera—when she
comes around in a couple of weeks…” said Ilia, as she launches into the
difficult task of not resisting gravity but instead controlling it wisely: that
is, getting out of the cab.
I suppose we will. But it’s unnerving to walk into a theater
and have to wonder—where will Mimi or Rodolfo or Musetta be today?
More than unnerving—it’s also disrespectful. To the
composer, who went to a lot of trouble to write an opera and set it in the
period he wanted: shouldn’t his wishes be respected? Anybody out there want to
repaint the Mona Lisa into modern clothes? So why are we treating Verdi less
well than Da Vinci?
It’s also a dis to the audience. You think I cannot relate
to a story as old as mankind itself—a ruthless woman, blind ambition, a man
trying to assert his masculinity to satisfy his wife, guilt, shame?
At its best, a reinterpretation can bring something new—and
valuable—to the stage. But too often, it ends up like this, from Opera
News about a 2012 production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare:
Cesare's political intrigue and manifest eroticism could easily have
been given heightened contemporary relevance, but directors Leiser and Caurier
worked their updating of the opera with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The
scenes dealing with sexuality were, for the most part, embarrassingly
primitive, the nadir being Tolomeo's simulated masturbation while leering at a
nude female picture in a magazine centerfold.
Guys? I’m with my mother-in-law, for God’s sakes. And
if I want to see someone masterbating….
OK—you be the judge. Check out the historically correct—and
wonderfully sung—‘Sull Aria below. And then check out the clip of Cecilia Bartoli—also
singing wonderfully—but appearing as a devil with the horns shifted 90 degrees.
Oh, and wearing a dirty cloth sack over her head.
I rest my point…..
