Time for the latest installment in the decreasingly frequent mash-up series of SNLC with the occasional opera diaries originally started by DK’er Demi Moaned, tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-casts. Thus, the standard variation on today’s opener goes:
Anyone see the Met’s HD-cast of Der Rosenkavalier today?
Given current domestic madness, it wouldn’t be a surprise if most people those very few who stumble across this diary answer “No”. The simplistic stereotype about opera, or even what one might call “high culture” in general, is that most ‘Amurrikans’ don’t care about about either, and think that neither has relevance to “real people” or “real life”. So why even bother diarying about opera on DK? Very fair question, and I don’t have a really ‘good’ answer — except, perhaps, to say:
* This series has been going on for several years now, and it seems reasonable to keep it going, even if very few people care.
* There are already many (too many?) diaries on hot-button issues of the moment now, and one more diary on a hot-button topic would likely get lost. (This diary is likely to get lost on DK anyway, especially at this late hour.)
* Perhaps in a bit of a “political” slant, with the current dust-up with threats to eliminate the NEA and the NEH, this is a small reminder that art, including opera, can be a positive force for people and society (as opposed to a useless, prohibitively expensive border wall that can never work, but 3CM the loser digresses, as usual).
First, per 3CM’s usual (loserly) protocol, some linky goodness, starting with a synopsis of the plot and a link to a pdf of today’s actual program booklet, the latter of which has a really nice overview of the opera in addition to the synopsis, and good intro background on composer Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl. The Met Opera has this intro video on the production:
For some reviews of this production from opening night, mainly from the usual suspects:
* Anthony Tommasini, NYT
* Martin Bernheimer, FT
* David Patrick Stearns, WQXR
* Russell Platt, The New Yorker
Getting away from standard media outlets, here are a few blogosphere reviews:
* Micaela Baranello, Likely Impossibilities blog
* Eric C. Simpson, New York Classical Review
As a bonus, WQXR has a podcast of the production’s Octavian, Elīna Garanča, talking about singing the “trousers” (i.e. a mezzo-soprano singing a male) part of Octavian, the current boy-toy squeeze of the Marschallin (Renee Fleming).
The big selling point for this production has been the hoopla around the idea that this production represents (probably) the farewell to the role of the Marschallin of Renée Fleming, probably the most famous American opera singer today, in so far as the American public has any awareness of opera at all. A somewhat puffy (but still entertaining, with some incisive, non-puffy bits) piece by Charles McGrath in the NYT here talks about RF’s “long goodbye”, so to speak, in managing her career at age 58:
‘People who know Ms. Fleming, 58, say that she has been planning this moment for years. The novelist Ann Patchett, who became friends with her after finishing Bel Canto, ”about a diva with many Fleming-like traits, said recently: “For as long as I’ve known Renée, the thing she always talks about is the fact that it’s all going to end. She has always had this feeling: ‘I’m a carton of yogurt with an expiration date stamped on it, and that day will come and I’ll be thrown out.’”’
In a less blunt way, that’s one theme of the opera Der Rosenkavalier, particularly as embodied by Fleming’s character, the Marschallin (short for Feldmarschallin, the Field Marshal’s wife). She knows that her fling with Octavian is just that, a fling, with basically a teenager (17 years, 2 months is Octavian’s age in the opera). The Marschallin muses on the passage of time in Act I, with the famous (in opera) sentiment:
“Manchmal steh’ ich auf mitten in der Nacht und lass’ die Uhren alle, alle steh’n.”
(Often I rise in the middle of the night and stop all, all the clocks.)
With sentiments like that, it’s clear that, even though the opera is named Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose), which is Octavian’s character, the conscience/heart and soul of the opera is the Marschallin.
Some criticisms of Fleming’s voice over her career are noted in these comments by McGrath, and also Stearns in his review:
CM: “Her detractors sometimes claim that Ms. Fleming’s voice is actually too much of a good thing: too lush, too creamy. She has been called the June Cleaver of opera singers — too bland, in other words — and her voice has been described as Botoxed, so plump and seamless that it lacks dramatic expressiveness. Ms. Fleming’s sound hasn’t darkened with age, as often happens to sopranos. (If it had, she might have ended up with a wider choice of roles in her 50s). She’s not as virtuosic as she once was, but whether you like her voice or not, she still sounds much the way she did 25 years ago.”
DPS: “In the psychologically rich role of the Field Marshall's wife, Fleming was in her all-too-typical medium-voltage form (slathering everything with pretty much the same creamy vocal tone) until Act III, when she summoned the kind of expressive urgency that originally made her a star.”
To an extent, I can see both points. RF’s German diction, though certainly not making total mush of the words, isn’t the crispest. But it is what it is, and she still has commanding stage presence, befitting her character, especially when she sets things to rights in Act III. Plus, if only in a superficial way (but important for the movies, since this is about imagery as well as the music), she looked great in this production, not just for 58, but great, period.
Of course, it helps to have a strong cast off which to play. In the title role, the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča was very good indeed, in what ironically is her own farewell performance in this particular role, although Garanča is ~40 and thus very much in the midst of her career. In the intermission chit-chat with Matthew Polenzani (who sang the cameo of the Italian Singer in this HD-cast, dressed up and mustachioed like Enrico Caruso, and thus did double-duty, with a bit of quick snark from MP about “Peter Gelb’s efficiency measures”, or words to that effect), EG noted the coincidence that she first sang the role of Octavian 17 years and just about 2 months ago, so it made for nice symmetry to end her career run in this role today. EG was quite dramatically engaged with the role, certainly on an acting level. This somewhat qualifies, IMHO, Baranello’s group evaluation of RF and EG:
“…you go to Renée Fleming and Elina Garanca for lush sound, not for textual insight. Neither seems to have a great deal going on behind the words. Garanca sounds gorgeous, Fleming sounds excellent, but they’re classy rather than distinctive. Fleming in particular seems to miss the sadness and bitterness deep in this role and is content to settle with “somewhat sad.”
Garanča is certainly crisper (or at least less mushy) in her German diction of the pair, IMHO. In terms of stage drama, she has a lot more to do, as her character travels the farthest in the arc of the story, when she works to save Sophie, the daughter of the newly ennobled Faninal, from a potentially disastrous marriage to Baron Ochs, a cousin of the Marschallin. In terms of “performing to the camera” and not just the audience, she’s obviously in good physical condition to deal with all of the stage business, as she acknowledged doing training in advance of the production, during the chit-chat, but also in the intermission chit-chat from the Eugene Onegin HD-cast a few weeks back:
In fact, one moment in Act III saw her crossing her eyes at just the right moment to be captured on film, a detail virtually impossible to see from the house (certainly from the back of the house).
Soprano Erin Morley (who had a daughter 3 months ago, around the time of rehearsals starting for this production, revealed during the intermission chatter) sang Sophie, and generally quite well. There’s a hint of semi-proto-feminism, subliminally related to the time period of the production (of which more anon), when Sophie finally summons, sort of/kind of, the nerve to speak up to her father about not wanting to marry the crude, overbearing Ochs, after the very bad first impression that Ochs has made on her. Octavian tries to push Sophie to stand up for herself to her father, but obviously given the social strictures of the past (even in the relatively “updated” time of the production, never mind the 18th century of the nominal original setting), easier said than done.
This leaves the last main role, and the key male role in the opera, Baron Ochs, the nominal Austrian “country bumpkin” who tries to marry Sophie basically for her family’s money. The tradition of the role has been that singers of the role tend to be a bit older, and the character is played more as a somewhat bloated, leering buffoon. But more seriously, his character is a guy who is used to running roughshod over any social veneers and getting his own way, particularly with women. Sound familiar? (I heard at least one comparison in the audience during the first intermission to the obvious parallel.)
In this production, the Austrian bass Günther Groissböck is not at all a bloated tub of lard. In fact, he’s in good shape and pretty nimble on his feet, to deal with all the stage action that Carsen threw at him, in addition to the required clueless, boorish pawing of Sophie by Ochs. Or, as Bernheimer put it in one of his relatively few compliments for this production and the singers:
“Günther Groissböck makes Baron Ochs tough, raunchy and dangerously amusing, an impetuous ruffian generously equipped with a deep-deep basso. No fat clown clichés for him.”
Baranello comments in the same vein:
“My standards for Ochsen are not high, few basses can sing it compellingly and he usually comes across as a crass dupe. Groissböck’s rather aggressive take is younger, more energetic, and less of an obvious victim. He’s not the village idiot but a man with power who is used to getting whatever he wants. This makes his eventual comeuppance much more satisfying and the slapstick comedy far more engaging than usual. Vocally, he isn’t huge but connects with the text in a natural way and sings the role’s big range with more ease and fluency than, I think, any other Ochs I’ve heard.”
In his intermission banter with Polenzani, Groissböck is a genuinely charming guy, and seemingly the total opposite of the repellent character that he portrays. You can also see and hear him chatting with Fleming in the above video clip, and comes off as a good fellow. He confirms the strong impression that I got of him in the much less showy character of the Landgraf in Wagner’s Tannhauser 2 seasons ago. Not a famous name even in Opera-Land or HD-land, certainly compared with Fleming (but then who is), but he’s eminently worth watching.
The conductor, Sebastian Weigle, commanded charmingly fractured English in his chit-chat with Polenzani. More importantly, he guided the ship that is the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra well from the pit, and paced things well to follow his singers nicely, again earning a word of praise from Bernheimer.
This leaves the other main factor to discuss about this HD-cast, namely the production itself, a new staging to the Met Opera by Robert Carsen. The previous Met Opera production, originally from 1969 (!), was by Nathaniel Merrill, definitely in the old-school “silver and gold”, fairy-tale like 18th-century tradition, with no dark or hard edges. The Met HD’ed the Merrill production back in 2009 or thereabouts, which I had seen on HD at the time, and also had Fleming as the Marschallin. Baranello notes a subliminal reason why productions of Der Rosenkavalier have tended to be “traditional”, even given that the original nominal 18th-century Viennese setting is a fantastical Vienna that never literally existed in that way anyway:
“Der Rosenkavalier is like the concept musical of opera: more about ideas and setting than linear plot, its staging almost written into its text…This makes it a tricky work to deconstruct because so much of the Meaning and specific local color are there and seemingly fixed. Can a work already preoccupied with artifice and a particular time and place, endowed with Hofmannsthal’s extremely literary libretto, really stand another layer of interpretation? You can’t just plop it into a generic fascist dystopia and call it a day.”
The reactions to Carsen’s new staging have been divided, to put it mildly. As the program booklet and the reviews have noted, Carsen updated the historical setting from a generic sometime-in-the-18th-century to 1911, the year of the opera’s premiere. In other words, we’re at the time just before WWI, and the destruction of the European order at the time. The older production didn’t dwell on the question of just how Faninal got to be one of the nouveau-riche in Vienna, but Carsen spells it out, based on one line from Ochs about Faninal’s military supplier business.
“Er hat die Lieferung für die Armee, die in den Niederlanden steht.”
(“He’s the supplier for the army in the Netherlands.”)
Presumably, this is the basis for having Ochs (and even Octavian) and his minions dressed in 19th-century military garb, as well as the literal pieces of artillery wheeled out as ginormous stage props in Act II. Simpson commented on this as a goof, IHHO, in the production, calling it “bizarre”, which according to ‘literalist’ stagecraft, it rather is. (Now, IMHO, if Faninal’s Act II palace had featured armanents lined up along the walls, like in a museum, that would have been OK, in the context of this production.) One detail that the HD-cast allows us to see up close, which would be lost to just about everyone in the actual theater, is the logo on armaments boxes of the brand name “Faninal”, but with the “F” in the form of what looks like a machine gun. One other idea that has gotten some criticism is at the very end, after Sophie and Octavian have sung their “happily ever after” duet, where normally, the Marschallin’s young boy servant, Muhammed (!), finds a handkerchief that Sophie has dropped on stage, picks it up, and trips out to music that quickly brings the curtain down. Not so here, per Simpson, who has choice words for Carsen on what to do with that visual moment:
“In the most disastrous blunder of all, the back of the set opens during Sophie and Octavian’s final, euphoric embrace to reveal the gruesome fate of Ochs and his goons in a slow-mo infantry charge (since the audience apparently can’t be trusted to make the right inference about the Great War), which ought to be scrapped immediately.”
Although, at least in musical fairness, one sonic virtue of Carsen’s staging is that the HD-audience actually got to hear Strauss’ musical closes to both Acts I and III, which tend to get lost when the audience applauds as the curtain starts to fall, before the music has actually stopped.
Also, maybe the biggest shock of the production (besides the artillery) is the setting of Act III in a brothel, rather than a cozy Viennese inn (again, as is traditional). Stearns commented, with a quick literary reference as kind of subtext lurking in the historical background:
“The low-class tavern of Act III became a house of ill repute, which made sense in this era of La Ronde, the 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play about Viennese sexual mores.”
Simpson also noted one source of boos on the first night:
“Some will be scandalized – as indeed were a number of boo-birds at Thursday’s premiere – by the return of strippers to the Met’s stage, as though nudity in a bordello is too much to bear.”
Well, if one is going to do that setting, one may as well go all the way, correct? Plus, the proprietor of the establishment was given not as a working-class tavernier, but as a drag queen. Baranello further elaborates on Act III, but she actually has praise for it:
“Act 3 is the production’s most provocative. (Maybe this is why there doesn’t appear to be a single available press photo depicting any part of it. Sorry.) The setting of a garish brothel is only a hop away from the original’s chambre separée, as they say in operetta, though the production does have a lot more fun than usual with the local personalities. This also means that Carsen ditches the usual Ochs scare tactics of trapdoors and such, but finds appropriate analogues (suggesting that there’s no reason to take the libretto’s specificity as law). (Most hilarious was a half-naked man who appeared to wander in mid-tryst to retrieve a lost watch? I was sitting quite far away, but I think that is what happened.)”
Yup, that’s what happened, in up-close on HD. It was jarring at first, but made sense a moment later, when you remember that a bunch of nightmare visions are unleashed on Ochs at the inn, usually through trapdoors in more ‘traditional’ settings. Moreover, Baranello has ideas of what she thinks Carsen had in the back of mind here:
“But there’s a bigger thing going on here: the production really leans into the queer and carnivalesque aspects of the piece, which is actually kind of unusual — you wouldn’t think an opera with this much drag would end up prim, but it often does. Octavian’s maid outfit is, er, more convincing than is entirely plausible within the realms of the plot, and instead of a naïve country girl he gives Ochs something rather more practiced with a lot more sex farce slapstick, and Garanca finally manages to loosen up. (Including a Marlene Dietrich impression at one point.)… And since we’re dealing here with an Ochs who serves as a representative of hegemonic masculinity, the idea of him being brought down so thoroughly by a queer spectacle is gratifying.”
Thus, regarding Baranello’s own question about “another layer of interpretation”, her own answer is actually “yes”. For himself, Simpson is with Baranello in regardigs the new Carsen production rather highly, so that the critical quotes I put in above aren’t the whole story from him. Even when Simpson notes where Carsen falls flat, IHHO, he admires Carsen for having the guts to do the big rethink of the opera. Even Tommasini, who tends to be overly deferential to the Met Opera in his reviews (in contrast to Bernheimer’s full-throttle snark when he doesn’t like things), leans to the nice side in commenting on Carsen’s updating:
“Mr. Carsen, whose updated production of Verdi’s Falstaff was a high point of recent Met seasons, wants us to consider the seedy, disturbing underside of the comic elements. He goes too far sometimes. A sizable contingent of the audience booed him and the production team during curtain calls. But they won many bravos as well. I admire the way he goes all out with his intriguing take.”
The advantage, perhaps the one advantage, of HD is that if a production isn’t totally to your liking visually, the camera tends to focus, understandably enough, on the singers rather than the stage as a whole. So with close-ups of RF, EG, EM, GG and friends, you obviously tend not to get the whole stage to watch at the movies at most times. That can minimize any distaste for what you don’t like about a particular production. For the most part, despite any reservations about the big guns as such, this HD-transmission went very well, particularly with its focus on the singers. In particular, this was obviously the performance to celebrate Fleming, as everyone on stage and in the house knew, witnessed by the huge cheers for her at the curtain call. (Late edit: the NYT has an article with a video of RF’s curtain call here.) Even at the start, there was brief applause at her first entrance in Act I, like when a major actor first appears in a Broadway show. But in fairness to RF, and in deference to the opera’s title, the last bow among the singer went to Garanča, who got a very substantial audience roar herself, in tribute to her hanging up her role in her own repertoire. Interestingly, this production was also the first time that RF and EG worked together in an opera production. It’s rather touching, and perhaps a bit poignant, to think that this was also the last time they’d work together on stage.
Given Fleming’s celebrity stature in opera, she will have plenty of other opportunities to keep busy in music, as McGrath noted:
“Ms. Fleming insisted that she wouldn’t stop singing entirely but that she was just changing her focus. She plans to give more concerts (which, though she didn’t say so, are both easier and far more lucrative than singing staged opera), make more records, find new music to sing, and spend more time at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where she was named creative consultant in 2010.”
But beyond the classical music bubble, again according to McGrath, Fleming has other ideas in mind:
“As comfortable sitting on panels as standing onstage, Ms. Fleming has lobbied for arts education in schools and is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health on a project to study the effects of music on the brains of people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Not a bad post-stage career agenda. If nothing else, this writer certainly wishes RF all the best for her future work. She’s definitely a beacon of blue-style thinking in an all-too-red climate.
With that, you can either:
- Talk about the HD-cast, or:
- Observe the standard SNLC protocol.
But since we are semi-open-minded here, doing both is certainly a plausible option.