Jernigan's
Opera
Journal
by Charles Jernigan
by Charles Jernigan
December 3, 2011
There was a time, within my lifetime, when the only aria from a Handel opera that was well known was "Ombra mai fu," widely called "Handel's Largo." Probably most people did not know that the "Largo" was from an opera at all (Serse or Xerxes) and even fewer that it is a comic aria in which Xerxes is singing to his beloved-- a plane tree. How things have changed. Handel operas have entered the repertory of opera houses all over the world and the problems that bedeviled anyone who wanted to mount these works thirty years ago seem to have been solved. Probably the first problem was the belief that no modern audience would sit through 3 hours or more of da capo arias; in an age used to Puccini and Verdi, baroque opera was just too static and stylized, and how do you construct viable stage action around all of those words repeated over and over? Another problem was the vocal casting of operas where the main roles were often taken by castrati, and even the non-castrato roles required a technique that few singers had. And then there were the hopelessly contrived plots, so far from the post-romantic verismo that was in fashion for most of the twentieth century. But some people knew that Handel wrote great music in the operas as well as the oratorios and chamber works, and in 1920-- almost a hundred years ago-- the modern Handel revival began in the small town of Gottingen, Germany, at a festival dedicated to Handel's music, precisely with the opera of today's MET in HD broadcast, Rodelinda, Regina de' Longobardi.
It has taken a long time, but the problems seem to have been resolved, and we have been privileged to discover a whole realm of treasures that were unheard by our fathers and grandfathers. First, the singers. We now have a whole coterie of singers who have been trained in baroque technique and repertory. The problem of the castrati, or lack thereof, has been resolved by an amazing growth of excellent countertenors. It has not been many years since directors and conductors cast tenors in these central roles by transposing the music, or sopranos, or more likely mezzo sopranos, and this still takes place sometimes, but more and more often the original castrato roles are sung by countertenors who have the power to fill a large house like the Met. These "white" voices take some getting used to, but more and more audiences are accustomed to the sound, which can be very beautiful. Likewise, famous singers who are not baroque specialists have taken to singing Handel operas sometimes because they are so rewarding musically. And not to forget the orchestras which have learned to play the music properly with baroque instruments (sometimes) which approximate a sound Handel might have heard.
Musicologists have restored the scores and conductors have insisted more and more on performing them in fairly uncut versions, with the ABA da capo arias sung whole as intended. The first Handel opera I ever saw was a vastly altered Giulio Cesare with Beverly Sills as Cleopatra and Norman Treigle as Julius Caesar, originally a castrato role now sung by a bass-baritone. As daring as it was in its day, it was far from anything Handel would have recognized. If most modern productions are not completely true to Handel (as is the case with this Met production), at least they go a long way to restoring it the way it should be done musically.
Directors too have learned how to stage the operas without longueurs which make us want to yawn. The huge Met stage presents a challenge too, since baroque opera usually works better in small theaters like Central City, which has had two great hits with Handel's Rinaldo and Amadigi in recent years. These operas, with their small orchestras and elaborate coloratura embroidery were designed for small theaters, not huge spaces like the Met. Stephen Wadsworth, the stage director, decided to embrace the "largeness" of the Met stage instead of making it smaller (as did Bartlett Sher in last year's Comte Ory from the Met). He and set designer Thomas Lynch created huge, complicated, realistic sets which evoked the various palace interiors, a graveyard and a prison. The sets rolled in and out from the wings in front of the audience and even lifted up in the last act to reveal the dungeon where Rodelinda's husband Bertarido is confined. Franco Zeffirelli would have been pleased. Wadsworth also peopled the sets with lots of extras who came and went, giving a sense of motion which counteracted the static nature of the da capo arias. The singers themselves were highly choreographed and moved around while singing, or other singers were given some action while someone else had their lyric moment on stage. All of this motion-- singers, extras (supernumeraries) and sets-- gave a sense of dynamism and realism which took us into the story and counteracted the built-in stasis of the da capo aria format. Of course the moving camera contributed too in the movie version. Wadsworth also took the story, which is based on a series of tropes or plot devices common to baroque opera, seriously, even the more outrageous and unrealistic tropes like Rodelinda demanding that the villain Grimoaldo kill her beloved son, or Bertarido wounding his friend, the faithful Unulfo in the dark, making Rodelinda assume that Bertarido is dead (the excuse for a lovely aria). It is not the only way to do a baroque opera, but it works.
In fact, the only other production of Rodelinda I have seen was in Munich, in an updated version by David Alden, which used a classic automobile and neon signs on stage and set the opera in the mid- twentieth century. The struggle for the throne among the Longobards became a struggle for the position of capo of an organized crime family. Rodelinda herself was a mafia wife, not the Queen of the Longobards. In theory the action of Handel's opera (not Alden's) takes place in Milan in the seventh century; the Longobards are the barbarian tribe that eventually become the Lombards, giving their name to Lombardy. However, Wadsworth sets the action in Handel's time, and the singers wore eighteenth century costumes; the sets looked sort of eighteenth century Italian too. I am sure that it all looked more like the eighteenth century in Handel's London too than seventh century barbarian Lombardy. Action flowed evenly from the interior of an elaborate eighteenth century library to a stable to a graveyard, and back.
Renée Fleming as the title character and Andreas Scholl as Bertarido in Handel's Rodelinda.
Photo by: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.
Stephanie Blythe is another singer whose métier is not really baroque opera, but she managed the runs with ease as the "other" woman, Princess Eduige, sister to the deposed ruler, Bertarido. Anyone who has heard Blythe in the opera house, in Wagner or as Ulrica in Ballo in Maschera, knows that she is an elemental force, one of the largest and greatest contralto voices today, although sadly, with the homogenization required by movie sound, you would not know it. She had exactly the same volume and fulness of tone as everyone else, no more and no less.
The two countertenors taking the two castrato roles (Bertarido and Unulfo) were both superb: Andreas Scholl and Iestyn Davies. Both are Handel specialists and managed the dizzying runs and ornaments with ease. The first Bertarido was Senesino, one of the greatest castrati of all time, and Scholl made his music sound easy. Particularly good were the lovely slow arias such as "Dove sei, amato bene" in Act I. Ornamentation in the repeats of the da capo arias (the second A's of the ABA form) was always tasteful and interesting and demonstrated why the arias contained the repeats in the first place-- so the singer could show off his or her abilities. Also good was the tenor villain, Grimoaldo (a fine name for a villain), sung by Joseph Kaiser and his henchman, Garibaldo (Shenyang).
The Met orchestra, definitely not a baroque orchestra, nonetheless played well under Harry Bicket. It was augmented by a theorbo and two harpsichords, from one of which Bicket conducted. One disadvantage of opera at the movies is that you cannot watch the conductor from time to time, which I find especially interesting in baroque works.
Altogether it was a fine Saturday morning at the opera, and a good introduction to baroque opera for those who don't have much experience in this repertory. If only they could cut the endless intermissions, which took up a full hour or more of the 4 hours and 15 minutes of the broadcast. In spite of Debbie Voigt's interesting conversations about the elaborate sets, it was a little too much for the sitzfleisch. It will be repeated on January 4.
Archive
Adriana Lecouvreur
from the ROH,
London
Nov. 28, 2011
Live vs. Live in HD
Nov. 8, 2011
Amadigi, Griselda
and Faust
Jul. 2011
Orphee aux Enfers,
aka Orpheus in the
Underworld
in Central City
Jul. 2011
Adriana Lecouvreur from the ROH, London
November 28, 2011
We have been privileged this fall to see three HD operas from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden-- Faust, Tosca, and now Adriana Lecouvreur. Only Faust was broadcast live; the Tosca was from last summer and the Adriana Lecouvreur from a year ago. All three starred the ROH’s prima donna assoluta, Angela Gheorghiu. Mme. Gheorghiu is still very pretty, even at 46, and she is very photogenic, so she is always a good choice for a filmed or televised production. She acts reasonably well, although a recent report that she plans a non-operatic stage career (in Romanian, French, or Italian, but not in English) may be a stretch too far; she is a decent actress on the operatic stage, but I am not sure she would be considered that good in stage plays.
One of Ms. Gheorghiu’s great assets is her figure, and she shows it to advantage in all three of the above roles: even the ingenue Marguerite likes to show off her cleavage in a manner that would send the prudish Valentin rushing into church. The fact that her voice is fairly small is not a disadvantage on screen where everybody has equal volume and projection. Hers is, to me, a generic voice, but she can manage lovely tones. Most of the time I get the feeling that she is playing herself and not the role (much like Renee Fleming has come to do, alas), but sometimes she does quit playing a diva and the role takes over.
She has come to that point in her career when, although still in her prime, the future is obviously a downward trajectory (thus her discussion of moving to spoken drama) and she is not the first soprano to turn to Cilea’s pot boiler at this particular moment in her career. Adriana Lecouvreur offers a splendid opportunity for a singer who is a seasoned actress and likes to play the diva, because the lead character is a stage diva and Cilea gives her ample opportunity to emote in a big way, both as an actress speak-singing a scene from Racine’s Phèdre and in her own drama off stage. Also, vocally, the role does not demand much of a top nor agility, but it does demand power and passion.
In her off-stage drama, Adriana is in love with Maurizio, a soldier who turns out to be a count, but he has been carrying on an affair with the Princess de Bouillon, who, as a jilted lover, becomes Adriana’s enemy and the agent of her death. Surprisingly, the libretto by Arturo Colautti is taken from a stage play by Eugène Scribe, who supplied libretti for Rossini and Meyerbeer early in the nineteenth century, and had been dead for decades by the time Cilea’s opera was premiered in 1902. The plot is fairly confusing, and the death of Adriana from a nosegay of poisoned violets is one of the least believable in opera, especially verismo opera. It wasn’t the first time that Scribe had caused a heroine to die from poisoned flowers; over fifty years before Cilea’s opera, Selika, the heroine of Scribe and Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine had died from inhaling the perfume of the Manchineel tree's extremely toxic flowers. But poisoned violets?
Musically, the opera is really pretty good. I had never seen it before, and I had probably not listened to it for 30 years or more. There are several good arias and a couple of passionate verismo duets. The busy dialoguish music of the crowd scenes, such as opens the opera, is strongly reminiscent of the Puccini of La bohème, but when Cilea gets going, the style is his own, and it is quite effective dramatically. There are some excellent lines in the libretto too. How Cilea as creator must have loved Adriana’s “Io son l’umile ancella del Genio creator” (“I am the humble handmaid of the creative genius”), and how every soprano who sings it loves it too! Cilea loves to plug his melodies, almost like leit-motifs, and some of them are very good indeed.
Still, Adriana Lecouvreur seems to need a superb cast to succeed (unlike Puccini’s blockbusters which seem to be effective even without great singers), and the ROH has surrounded Ms. Gheorghiu with an exceptionally fine cast. Jonas Kaufmann, the matinee-idol tenor of the times is exceptionally good as Maurizio, rough and masculine as a soldier should be, handsome and athletic enough to make a teenager swoon, and
with a perfect voice for this role,
particularly in his
ability to sing softly and diminuendo
to a soft note or expand to a
loud one. He is more subtle than Ms. Gheorghiu, who failed to
entirely bring off the last soft lines of “Io son l’umile ancella”: “un
soffio è la mia voce/che al novo dì morrà” (“My
voice is a breath/which dies at dawn”). Olga Borodina was
Adriana’s rival the Princess de Bouillon. She sang well, she is
too fat for the screen and too old for this role. In the opera
house it would not matter so much, but with all those close
ups.... The role is fairly thankless too, because the Princess is
a thoroughly dislikable character whose music is weak. Equal to
everyone else was Alessandro Corbelli as the old Michonnet, the stage
manager who secretly loves Adriana. Although Michonnet’s music is
not memorable, Corbelli made him an unforgettable character. And
ALL of the comprimario roles were excellently sung and acted, making it
seem that these were not minor characters at all. The bewigged
effeminateness of the Prince and the Abbe and some of the others made
Maurizio’s rough hewn look even more masculine.David McVicar, he of the recent Anna Bolena at the Met, was the stage director, and in a pre-performance talk he said he took his cue from the levels of illusion that Cilea and his librettist Colauti play with. In this opera, we the audience watch a noted diva playing an actress who plays to an on stage audience. The sets and costumes played with that illusion or series of illusions. There were no naked people running around the stage, no eurotrashy concepts, no updating (it was set appropriately in the eighteenth century) and if Adriana suffers death-by-violets, then she suffers death by violets--take it or leave it. Marc Elder makes a fine case for the score with the ROH orchestra. He believes in it, and he should; Enrico Caruso was an early Maurizio and a champion of the score.
In sum, this was a splendid performance, moving in the end in spite of the drawn out death scene, especially when McVicar has all of the costumed actors come dimly stage forward on the stage-within-a-stage and doff their hats to the deceased Adriana to the orchestral postlude at the opera’s end: it was very moving. Sure, this opera is a carefully constructed theatrical piece with calculated effects, but that is what the opera is about, that is the opera’s subject. There really was an actress named Adrienne Lecouvreur, although I doubt she died of flower poisoning. Thus the opera itself is about theatricality, and in a sense all successful opera has calculated effects, and if the calculation seems a bit more apparent here than usual, that’s the subject.
Oddly, this wonderful performance is playing at very few venues in the United States. The encore is at the Boedecker Theater in Boulder this Wednesday, but not in Denver. It plays in Brunswick, ME, but not Boston; Hunter, NY, but not New York City. But if you can find it at a venue near you, GO. It is a magic performance. If not, try to get a theater in your area to show these films; there is an extraordinary list of operas from various European houses on the internet at Opera in Cinema.
Live vs. Live in HD
November 8, 2011
The goal of our Fall
opera-going was the Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland, but on the way
we stopped in New York to catch Anna
Bolena live with Angela Meade
singing the title role. I had seen the HD performance “live” a
few weeks earlier with Netrebko. I was curious to see (and hear)
Meade because I had been so impressed with her in the same role a
couple of years ago in Philadelphia in a much smaller venue.
Otherwise the cast was the same as on the HD broadcast.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages to “live” opera house performances vs. “live” movie theater broadcasts. The broadcasts are more intimate with many close-ups, and if well acted, can be more involving. On the other hand, all the voices “flatten out” and sound equally powerful and there is never a problem with a voice being overwhelmed by the orchestra. In the opera house, you get the whole sweep of the stage and you can concentrate on what you want to look at, not what the TV director focusses on. And the frisson of seeing the singers succeed (or sometimes fail) is much more real than on a movie screen.
That
said,
it
seems to me that the TV direction of the “Live from the
Met” broadcasts has gotten better over time, and video direction can
help to involve the spectator. On the other hand, seeing and
hearing Anna Bolena in New
York, I was surprised at how big Smeaton’s
(Tamara Mumford) voice was; she carried easily to the far reaches of
the house. Meade was marginally better than Netrebko in the
coloratura and fioratura department, but because the Met production cut
all of the cabaletta repeats except the final one for Anna, there was
not much chance to enjoy the variations that test a singer’s ability to
decorate in bel canto opera. Meade acted reasonably well, but she
lacks Netrebko’s charisma and stage presence. Her girth and
steatopygian figure would not seem to work well on TV either, although
there will be a chance to test that theory in the spring when there
will be an HD performance of Ernani with Meade.
In the end, I think I give the edge to the HD Broadcast (shocking, no doubt, some of my anti-HD friends) when the live alternative is in a house as big as the Met. The broadcast was involving in a way that is very difficult to achieve in a huge house. This is not true in the small opera houses of Europe, even the larger ones, which were the intended venues for bel canto. The Met is just too big for this kind of opera to be fully effective. Which is not to say that Meade’s voice did not fill the house. As it seemed to me before, she has a voice of Wagnerian power with true bel canto technique, a very unusual combination. She is an exciting singer and I will enjoy watching her grow.
As for the opera itself, it is an old truth to say that Anna Bolena is Donizetti’s first great success that took his reputation beyond Italy. Listening to it, one can hear Donizetti mature into a great composer before one’s ears, as it were. Most of the opera is dramatic and well wrought (with careful work in the recitatives), but the final scene--all of it--is truly great from the orchestral introduction through Anna’s in-and-out of madness scene with “Al dolce guidami, castel natio,” through the prayer, based on the same melody as Bishop’s “Home Sweet Home,” to the final fiery cabaletta, “Coppia iniqua.” It is all a masterpiece. The earlier part of the opera has moments of brilliance, but generally (in my opinion) without the great melodic invention that we have come to associate with the Donizetti operas of the 1830’s and ’40’s. But “Al dolce guidami” and “Coppia iniqua” are as good as anything in Lucia or La favorite. Working in Giuditta Pasta’s villa near Milan to an excellent libretto by Felice Romani, Donizetti grew up.
There are of course advantages and disadvantages to “live” opera house performances vs. “live” movie theater broadcasts. The broadcasts are more intimate with many close-ups, and if well acted, can be more involving. On the other hand, all the voices “flatten out” and sound equally powerful and there is never a problem with a voice being overwhelmed by the orchestra. In the opera house, you get the whole sweep of the stage and you can concentrate on what you want to look at, not what the TV director focusses on. And the frisson of seeing the singers succeed (or sometimes fail) is much more real than on a movie screen.
That
said,
it
seems to me that the TV direction of the “Live from the
Met” broadcasts has gotten better over time, and video direction can
help to involve the spectator. On the other hand, seeing and
hearing Anna Bolena in New
York, I was surprised at how big Smeaton’s
(Tamara Mumford) voice was; she carried easily to the far reaches of
the house. Meade was marginally better than Netrebko in the
coloratura and fioratura department, but because the Met production cut
all of the cabaletta repeats except the final one for Anna, there was
not much chance to enjoy the variations that test a singer’s ability to
decorate in bel canto opera. Meade acted reasonably well, but she
lacks Netrebko’s charisma and stage presence. Her girth and
steatopygian figure would not seem to work well on TV either, although
there will be a chance to test that theory in the spring when there
will be an HD performance of Ernani with Meade.In the end, I think I give the edge to the HD Broadcast (shocking, no doubt, some of my anti-HD friends) when the live alternative is in a house as big as the Met. The broadcast was involving in a way that is very difficult to achieve in a huge house. This is not true in the small opera houses of Europe, even the larger ones, which were the intended venues for bel canto. The Met is just too big for this kind of opera to be fully effective. Which is not to say that Meade’s voice did not fill the house. As it seemed to me before, she has a voice of Wagnerian power with true bel canto technique, a very unusual combination. She is an exciting singer and I will enjoy watching her grow.
As for the opera itself, it is an old truth to say that Anna Bolena is Donizetti’s first great success that took his reputation beyond Italy. Listening to it, one can hear Donizetti mature into a great composer before one’s ears, as it were. Most of the opera is dramatic and well wrought (with careful work in the recitatives), but the final scene--all of it--is truly great from the orchestral introduction through Anna’s in-and-out of madness scene with “Al dolce guidami, castel natio,” through the prayer, based on the same melody as Bishop’s “Home Sweet Home,” to the final fiery cabaletta, “Coppia iniqua.” It is all a masterpiece. The earlier part of the opera has moments of brilliance, but generally (in my opinion) without the great melodic invention that we have come to associate with the Donizetti operas of the 1830’s and ’40’s. But “Al dolce guidami” and “Coppia iniqua” are as good as anything in Lucia or La favorite. Working in Giuditta Pasta’s villa near Milan to an excellent libretto by Felice Romani, Donizetti grew up.
Amadigi, Griselda and Faust
July, 2011
A quick road trip took us and
Mahala and Rich Beams to Central City to see Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula, then on to Santa
Fe for Peter Seller’s (excuse me, Vivaldi’s) Griselda and Gounod’s Faust. And then back to
Central City for a second Amadigi.
Amadigi is Handel’s second opera for London, right after Rinaldo. Amadigi is one of those knights errant that Cervantes’ Don Quixote loved. He is in love with the beautiful Oriana, and unfortunately so is his buddy and fellow soldier, Dardano. The sorceress Melissa (Amadigi is a magic opera like Rinaldo) loves Amadigi and has imprisoned him and Oriana. When Amadigi rejects her, Melissa works some magic and has Dardano appear to be Amadigi; Oriana flirts with him. Amadigi having seen Oriana’s “faithlessness” reflected in a magic fountain designed by Melissa is struck dumb and eventually rejects Oriana. When Dardano challenges him to a duel, he is killed by Amadigi. Melissa summons his ghost from the dead to help her, but he tells her that the gods favor Amadigi and Oriana and not all of her powers can help her win. Melissa kills herself and a greater sorcerer, Orgando, descends from heaven to put things right and prepare the happy ending.
Sounds like Harry Potter and in their day these medieval and Renaissance tales were about as popular. They loved the reworkings of them in Handel’s day too. Most modern stage directors would update or contemporize the story in one way or another, but not Central City’s director, Alessandro Talevi, making his American debut. He decided to backdate the opera to the Italian Renaissance, weaving famous Renaissance paintings into the proceedings like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and Raphael’s “Portrait of Pope Julius II.” If I’m not mistaken, there’s also a reference to the book burning under Savanarola and to some of the machines of Leonardo da Vinci. There are even two large torture wheels right out of a Torture Museum, such as the one in San Gimignano, beloved by tourists. Talevi places the action in a sort of Renaissance studiolo, full of books and curio cabinets. These open cabinets roll in and out and are transformed in endlessly clever ways as the action proceeds. Thus Talevi has used the small stage to give us frequent movement which counteracts the basic static nature of baroque opera with its long string of da capo arias.
Talevi also worked with the four singers so that every gesture, every expression counted. There was never a moment in which a singer just stood and sang, but every action was clear and well motivated. In short, it was a wonderful production and everything a baroque opera should be. Our director also found the humanity in Melissa, who can come off as a simple villainess. In just one of the many, many lovely touches in this production, at the end when Handel gives us a celebratory dance, Talevi moves the dancers to the back of the stage and just one of Melissa’s votaries, now transformed by the Domenican priests into repentant figures in hair shirts, goes to Melissa’s body and weeps as the curtain falls. The production is a masterpiece.
The four singers are all very young, but all have experience in baroque style as does the conductor Matthew Halls. The two male roles were counter tenors, Christopher Ainslie and David Trudgen. Ainslie has a superb voice and great stage presence and looks like a hero ought to look. Trudgen’s voice is somewhat different than Ainslie’s, but equally powerful. His wonderful aria with oboe obbligato was a hit of the evening (or afternoon). Kathleen Kim, the Melissa, was a firebrand, able to soar and shoot through the baroque runs and coloratura passages with great agility that knocked our socks off in her great aria, "Ah! spietato!." Kim has been singing at the Met recently, and she was a wonderful Armida in Central City’s equally wonderful Rinaldo two years ago. The Oriana, Katherine Manley, was beautiful and competent, if not quite on the vocal level of the others. Finally, the conductor, Matthew Halls, kept everyone together and knew how to make the orchestra exciting while giving proper focus to individual instruments. Halls also conducted Rinaldo at CCO.
As wonderful as CCO’s Amadigi was, Santa Fe’s Griselda proved that baroque opera can indeed be boring with sighs of ‘not another da capo aria’! This was Peter Seller’s production, and of course he updated it to a contemporary urban environment complete with thugs in sunglasses toting machine guns. Directorial cliche after cliche tumbled out, none of which had anything to do with the opera. Not that the opera itself is bad. Check out the wonderful recording of it on the Naive label. It is one of the best opera recordings I have heard in years. The story, however, which comes from the final tale of the one hundred tales in Boccaccio’s Decameron, is difficult, perhaps impossible to stage convincingly for a modern audience. Certainly Sellers did not succeed in spite of a well articulated concept at pre-performance seminars and lectures, and on line.
Griselda is the abused wife of a ruler name Gualtiero. In order to test her, he pretends to have slain their daughter (though she has been raised abroad), tells her he plans to slay their young son, and tells her that he is going to toss her out in order to marry a new wife. When the new wife arrives, she is the now teenage daughter whom Griselda thought dead. Neither she nor Griselda know of the relationships. Through all of this Griselda stays faithful to ol’ Gualtiero and in the end, he tells her that, oh, I didn’t really mean it and I didn’t really do those bad things, and please come back and be my wife again and we’ll rule happily ever after. The libretto, originally by Apostolo Zeno and revised by a very young Carlo Goldoni, adds a few other characters and subplots--Ottone, another prince who loves Griselda and keeps trying to get her to agree to his killing her old man and marrying her; and Roberto, the believed-dead-and-believed-bride-daughter Costanza’s, boyfriend Roberto. There is also Corrado, a counsellor in the palace. Everybody gets two or three arias according to the strict rules of baroque opera, and there is a nice terzetto and a very short choral finale.
Sellers’ production played on an empty stage with one chair on it from time to time. He did not seem to know what motivated the characters and had them walk around aimlessly with nothing to hold on to. When that got old (which it did, fast), he had them lie on the floor and sing from there for no particular reason. In a bow to New Mexico, he had Ottone dressed like a barrio gang banger (or a rock band singer, take your pick). Costanza was dressed in the costume young Mexican-American girls use for coming out ceremonies, a sort of pink ball gown with many petticoats. Corrado got a lime green suit and Gualtiero got a polo outfit. Sellers wanted him to be dressed as a golfer, but the costume designer wanted to dress him like a polo player because it is ‘more New Mexican’. Polo in New Mexico? All of it seemed totally meaningless and added nothing to the opera that was being performed.
David Daniels was supposed to be the star performer of the evening, but he called in sick (sick of the production maybe) and we got his understudy. All of the other singers were young and without particular experience in baroque opera. None of them was able carry off the exciting fireworks that Vivaldi demands and most were approximate in their runs and ornamentation. The one exception was was the Corrado, Yuri Minenko, a counter tenor who seemed lost in his green suit. The serviceable Grant Gershon was the conductor, but he too lacks experience in this sort of music. The Griselda, Meredith Arwady, is a young singer who has been singing Wagner’s Erda at the Met. She looks like Erda too. Why someone would cast an Erda in a Vivaldi opera is beyond me. She couldn’t bring it off. The two other women in the score, Amanda Majeski and Isabel Leonard, are young and may very well grow into wonderful careers, but they are not there yet.
One further comparison: Central City’s opera house is tiny and perfect for baroque opera, while Santa Fe’s huge stage and large house is not kind to operas that were written to be performed in small spaces with small orchestras. The one good thing about Griselda was the giant cyclorama by Gronk which framed the action (or non action). It was spectacular to look at and brilliantly colored, although it was so overwhelming it might have distracted from the opera. It had nothing to do with the work at hand of course, although its colors and shapes may have been inspired by the New Mexico landscape and sky (and even the fire that still burned in Los Alamos). The lighting by James F. Ingalls also called attention to itself with lots of greens, reds and pinks and often intentionally put the singers in the dark, but for what reason I could not divine.
On the other hand, the night before an old chestnut was brushed up quite handily. This was the funniest Faust I have ever seen, but the jokes and ironic comments are actually in the text. Most of them belong to Mephistopheles, who was treated here as a fairly cheap carnival magician. The Kermesse was a circus, or better a freak show, circa 1880. Mephisto’s magic, including transforming Faust from old to young, were just magic tricks. Not that he wasn’t menacing when he needed to be, especially as a priest hearing Marguerite’s confession in the church scene. The large stage at Santa Fe was perfect for this opera, and the large orchestra and chorus was right for a large opera house. The production by Stephen Lawless was endlessly interesting and kept it moving along. There was only one intermission even though the production included the ballet (cleverly danced by women representing famous female heroines from French opera like Carmen and Dalilah, cast as cheap carnival attractions) and the often cut scene with Marguerite’s second aria “Il ne revient pas” and Siebel’s second aria. The singers were all good, if not great. Ailyn Perez as Marguerite husbanded her resources in the early part of the opera and could not really muster the where-with-all for the Jewel Song, but she rose to the occasion in the end. Bryan Hymel and Mark S. Doss as Faust and his nemesis were good and Doss was a fine actor as well. Jennifer Holloway as Siebel was just fine vocally and a good actress. Matthew Worth’s Valentin was weak in his famous aria “Avant de quitter ces lieux” but improved in his trio and death scene. Frederic Chaslin, Santa Fe’s new music director, is to the manor born and conducted lovingly. The old war horse came out looking new and exciting.
Amadigi is a magic opera, and in a way so is Faust. As has often been said, this is not Goethe, but it is a good entertainment and in the end the great trio and the apotheosis that followed are moving and inspiring. In this version, Marguerite mounts to a giant organ in the sky, which seemed appropriate to a twenty-first century Faust which takes the sentimentality with a grain of irony.
Amadigi is Handel’s second opera for London, right after Rinaldo. Amadigi is one of those knights errant that Cervantes’ Don Quixote loved. He is in love with the beautiful Oriana, and unfortunately so is his buddy and fellow soldier, Dardano. The sorceress Melissa (Amadigi is a magic opera like Rinaldo) loves Amadigi and has imprisoned him and Oriana. When Amadigi rejects her, Melissa works some magic and has Dardano appear to be Amadigi; Oriana flirts with him. Amadigi having seen Oriana’s “faithlessness” reflected in a magic fountain designed by Melissa is struck dumb and eventually rejects Oriana. When Dardano challenges him to a duel, he is killed by Amadigi. Melissa summons his ghost from the dead to help her, but he tells her that the gods favor Amadigi and Oriana and not all of her powers can help her win. Melissa kills herself and a greater sorcerer, Orgando, descends from heaven to put things right and prepare the happy ending.
Central City Opera’s
AMADIGI DI GAULA (2011). Pictured
(Center, L to R): Katherine Manley (Oriana), Christopher Ainslie
(Amadigi). Photo by Mark Kiryluk.
Sounds like Harry Potter and in their day these medieval and Renaissance tales were about as popular. They loved the reworkings of them in Handel’s day too. Most modern stage directors would update or contemporize the story in one way or another, but not Central City’s director, Alessandro Talevi, making his American debut. He decided to backdate the opera to the Italian Renaissance, weaving famous Renaissance paintings into the proceedings like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and Raphael’s “Portrait of Pope Julius II.” If I’m not mistaken, there’s also a reference to the book burning under Savanarola and to some of the machines of Leonardo da Vinci. There are even two large torture wheels right out of a Torture Museum, such as the one in San Gimignano, beloved by tourists. Talevi places the action in a sort of Renaissance studiolo, full of books and curio cabinets. These open cabinets roll in and out and are transformed in endlessly clever ways as the action proceeds. Thus Talevi has used the small stage to give us frequent movement which counteracts the basic static nature of baroque opera with its long string of da capo arias.
Talevi also worked with the four singers so that every gesture, every expression counted. There was never a moment in which a singer just stood and sang, but every action was clear and well motivated. In short, it was a wonderful production and everything a baroque opera should be. Our director also found the humanity in Melissa, who can come off as a simple villainess. In just one of the many, many lovely touches in this production, at the end when Handel gives us a celebratory dance, Talevi moves the dancers to the back of the stage and just one of Melissa’s votaries, now transformed by the Domenican priests into repentant figures in hair shirts, goes to Melissa’s body and weeps as the curtain falls. The production is a masterpiece.
The four singers are all very young, but all have experience in baroque style as does the conductor Matthew Halls. The two male roles were counter tenors, Christopher Ainslie and David Trudgen. Ainslie has a superb voice and great stage presence and looks like a hero ought to look. Trudgen’s voice is somewhat different than Ainslie’s, but equally powerful. His wonderful aria with oboe obbligato was a hit of the evening (or afternoon). Kathleen Kim, the Melissa, was a firebrand, able to soar and shoot through the baroque runs and coloratura passages with great agility that knocked our socks off in her great aria, "Ah! spietato!." Kim has been singing at the Met recently, and she was a wonderful Armida in Central City’s equally wonderful Rinaldo two years ago. The Oriana, Katherine Manley, was beautiful and competent, if not quite on the vocal level of the others. Finally, the conductor, Matthew Halls, kept everyone together and knew how to make the orchestra exciting while giving proper focus to individual instruments. Halls also conducted Rinaldo at CCO.
As wonderful as CCO’s Amadigi was, Santa Fe’s Griselda proved that baroque opera can indeed be boring with sighs of ‘not another da capo aria’! This was Peter Seller’s production, and of course he updated it to a contemporary urban environment complete with thugs in sunglasses toting machine guns. Directorial cliche after cliche tumbled out, none of which had anything to do with the opera. Not that the opera itself is bad. Check out the wonderful recording of it on the Naive label. It is one of the best opera recordings I have heard in years. The story, however, which comes from the final tale of the one hundred tales in Boccaccio’s Decameron, is difficult, perhaps impossible to stage convincingly for a modern audience. Certainly Sellers did not succeed in spite of a well articulated concept at pre-performance seminars and lectures, and on line.
Griselda is the abused wife of a ruler name Gualtiero. In order to test her, he pretends to have slain their daughter (though she has been raised abroad), tells her he plans to slay their young son, and tells her that he is going to toss her out in order to marry a new wife. When the new wife arrives, she is the now teenage daughter whom Griselda thought dead. Neither she nor Griselda know of the relationships. Through all of this Griselda stays faithful to ol’ Gualtiero and in the end, he tells her that, oh, I didn’t really mean it and I didn’t really do those bad things, and please come back and be my wife again and we’ll rule happily ever after. The libretto, originally by Apostolo Zeno and revised by a very young Carlo Goldoni, adds a few other characters and subplots--Ottone, another prince who loves Griselda and keeps trying to get her to agree to his killing her old man and marrying her; and Roberto, the believed-dead-and-believed-bride-daughter Costanza’s, boyfriend Roberto. There is also Corrado, a counsellor in the palace. Everybody gets two or three arias according to the strict rules of baroque opera, and there is a nice terzetto and a very short choral finale.
Sellers’ production played on an empty stage with one chair on it from time to time. He did not seem to know what motivated the characters and had them walk around aimlessly with nothing to hold on to. When that got old (which it did, fast), he had them lie on the floor and sing from there for no particular reason. In a bow to New Mexico, he had Ottone dressed like a barrio gang banger (or a rock band singer, take your pick). Costanza was dressed in the costume young Mexican-American girls use for coming out ceremonies, a sort of pink ball gown with many petticoats. Corrado got a lime green suit and Gualtiero got a polo outfit. Sellers wanted him to be dressed as a golfer, but the costume designer wanted to dress him like a polo player because it is ‘more New Mexican’. Polo in New Mexico? All of it seemed totally meaningless and added nothing to the opera that was being performed.
David Daniels was supposed to be the star performer of the evening, but he called in sick (sick of the production maybe) and we got his understudy. All of the other singers were young and without particular experience in baroque opera. None of them was able carry off the exciting fireworks that Vivaldi demands and most were approximate in their runs and ornamentation. The one exception was was the Corrado, Yuri Minenko, a counter tenor who seemed lost in his green suit. The serviceable Grant Gershon was the conductor, but he too lacks experience in this sort of music. The Griselda, Meredith Arwady, is a young singer who has been singing Wagner’s Erda at the Met. She looks like Erda too. Why someone would cast an Erda in a Vivaldi opera is beyond me. She couldn’t bring it off. The two other women in the score, Amanda Majeski and Isabel Leonard, are young and may very well grow into wonderful careers, but they are not there yet.
One further comparison: Central City’s opera house is tiny and perfect for baroque opera, while Santa Fe’s huge stage and large house is not kind to operas that were written to be performed in small spaces with small orchestras. The one good thing about Griselda was the giant cyclorama by Gronk which framed the action (or non action). It was spectacular to look at and brilliantly colored, although it was so overwhelming it might have distracted from the opera. It had nothing to do with the work at hand of course, although its colors and shapes may have been inspired by the New Mexico landscape and sky (and even the fire that still burned in Los Alamos). The lighting by James F. Ingalls also called attention to itself with lots of greens, reds and pinks and often intentionally put the singers in the dark, but for what reason I could not divine.
On the other hand, the night before an old chestnut was brushed up quite handily. This was the funniest Faust I have ever seen, but the jokes and ironic comments are actually in the text. Most of them belong to Mephistopheles, who was treated here as a fairly cheap carnival magician. The Kermesse was a circus, or better a freak show, circa 1880. Mephisto’s magic, including transforming Faust from old to young, were just magic tricks. Not that he wasn’t menacing when he needed to be, especially as a priest hearing Marguerite’s confession in the church scene. The large stage at Santa Fe was perfect for this opera, and the large orchestra and chorus was right for a large opera house. The production by Stephen Lawless was endlessly interesting and kept it moving along. There was only one intermission even though the production included the ballet (cleverly danced by women representing famous female heroines from French opera like Carmen and Dalilah, cast as cheap carnival attractions) and the often cut scene with Marguerite’s second aria “Il ne revient pas” and Siebel’s second aria. The singers were all good, if not great. Ailyn Perez as Marguerite husbanded her resources in the early part of the opera and could not really muster the where-with-all for the Jewel Song, but she rose to the occasion in the end. Bryan Hymel and Mark S. Doss as Faust and his nemesis were good and Doss was a fine actor as well. Jennifer Holloway as Siebel was just fine vocally and a good actress. Matthew Worth’s Valentin was weak in his famous aria “Avant de quitter ces lieux” but improved in his trio and death scene. Frederic Chaslin, Santa Fe’s new music director, is to the manor born and conducted lovingly. The old war horse came out looking new and exciting.
Amadigi is a magic opera, and in a way so is Faust. As has often been said, this is not Goethe, but it is a good entertainment and in the end the great trio and the apotheosis that followed are moving and inspiring. In this version, Marguerite mounts to a giant organ in the sky, which seemed appropriate to a twenty-first century Faust which takes the sentimentality with a grain of irony.
Orphee aux Enfers, aka Orpheus in the Underworld in Central City
July, 2010
What is perhaps Offenbach's
most delicious musical romp is the centerpiece of this year's Central
City Opera Festival in Colorado (the other operas are Butterfly and Heggie's Three Decembers). Central
City provides that great rarity in American opera production, a small
house with the kind of intimacy that most opera lovers have to travel
to Europe to find. The opera house, built of stone in the late
nineteenth century by the very miners who made Central City's and
neighboring Black Hawk's fortunes, is a jewel and the town is a jewel
too, tucked away in a cool mountain environment less than an hour from
downtown Denver. Today the Victorian houses vie with casinos,
mostly small and many in the old buildings. For two decades
the casinos have replaced the real gold, which ran out a century ago,
with the fool's gold of slots. It seems a fine setting for Orpheus in the Underworld-- a
raucous and bawdy opera in what was once a raucous and bawdy mining
town and today is a mini Vegas of the mountains.
Orpheus has been a hit since it first opened in another small theater, in Paris, the Bouffes-Parisiens, on October 21, 1858. Ostensibly it makes fun of classical mythology and especially the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here Orpheus and his wife are a bored, middle-class married couple. He teaches violin and the little woman has started an affair with a local shepherd, Aristaeus, who is really Pluto in disguise. Orpheus' youthful desire to be an artist has given way to the middle-aged ennui of teaching music lessons to girls, some of whom he is sleeping with, if Eurydice is to be believed.
Central City Opera’s ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD (2010). Edward Mout (Orpheus) and
Joanna Mongiardo (Eurydice). Photo by Mark Kiryluk.
But the gods up on Olympus are equally as bored as the mortals.
With nothing to do all day except eat ambrosia, they prefer to sleep--
unless they vary the boredom by having affairs. Even chaste
Diana, the virgin goddess is pissed because Jupiter has turned her
latest lover, Actaeon, into a stag. Jupiter defends himself by
saying that he has to keep up appearances for the sake of Public
Opinion: he can't have the Goddess of Chastity getting down with every
Tom, Dick and Actaeon.
Public Opinion is actually a character in the show. She introduces the action and drives the story. When Eurydice is bitten by a viper and dies (a design by Pluto to get her to the Underworld), Orpheus is ecstatic. He is rid of the ball and chain at last! But Public Opinion makes him go after her: the seriousness of mythology-- and marriage-- cannot be mocked! When Jupiter discovers that Pluto has abducted Eurydice, he vows to go to Hades to check it out. Public Opinion must be served; gods can't just go around abducting mortal girls. Of course all the bored gods on Olympus want to go too. A holiday! Hell sounds like such fun. They have wine and wild boar and dancing there. So much more exciting than Olympus with its steady and unvaried diet of ambrosia and sleep.
So, Act II takes place in the Underworld, Pluto's realm, which curiously and appropriately resembles a casino in the Central City production, where we find that Eurydice is a prisoner and we meet a new character, her servant and jailer, John Styx. That's right: John; it's "John," not Jean in the French libretto too. John Styx is from Boetia and his famous song is "Quand j'etais roi de Beotie," repeated ad naseum to hilarious effect. In ancient Greek comedy, Boetia was the sticks and people from there were considered hicks by the sophisticated Athenians. Is it any wonder that the French librettists gave this Boetian an English name? To a Parisian in 1858, Engiand was the cultural sticks and the English were hicks from the sticks or Styx, as the case may be: the nineteenth century Parisian's Boetia. Paris, of course, was the Center of Everything.
Soon Jupiter finds Eurydice and he finds her just as charming and pretty as Pluto did. Now we all know that Jupiter was forever turning himself into things (swans, bulls, showers of gold) in order to seduce mortal girls. But really! A fly? In the opera Jupiter turns himself into a giant and golden fly and has a duet with Eurydice in which all he sings is "buzzz"; physically he does a lot of buzzing around too, and this Jupiter-Fly wore a huge codpiece that made all that buzzing pretty explicit. Soon he hatches a plot with Eurydice so that she will come away with him. Eury, who is a social climber, thinks that Jupiter would make a more prestigious lover than Pluto, who was one up on Orpheus. That night there will be a party in Hell, Jupie tells Eury, and they can escape at its height.
The final scene is the party and it proves that everyone has more fun in Hell, just as G.B. Shaw said a half century later in Man and Superman. (Naturally it took the backwards English much longer to discover that Hell is more fun than it had the with-it Parisians.) Pluto is on to the plot however, and is trying to figure out how to thwart it when Orpheus arrives with Public Opinion in order to uphold the dignity of Mythology and Marriage and take Eurydice back. Pluto was starting to get bored anyway; why, he might as well be a husband! Jupie decrees that Orpheus can take her back to the living, but he can't look at her until he gets her out-- who knows where that caveat comes from-- it's "inexplicable," he tells us. It's not up to mortals to understand the ways of the gods! When it looks like Orpheus is actually going to obey, Jupiter throws a thunderbolt and Orpheus looks back. Eurydice disappears. Mythology is upheld! But not to worry. Jupiter turns Eury into a Bacchante and the whole thing ends in one of the most famous tunes to come out of "Classical" music: the "infernal Galop," universally known to posterity as the "French Can Can."
Central City Opera’s ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD (2010). Joanna Mongiardo (Eurydice) and
the Can-can Girls (L to R: Kaitlyn Costello, Alisa Jordheim, Kelly Hill). Photo by Kira Horvath.
Actually, the dance IS a galop, just as the "Lone Ranger Theme" from
the William Tell overture is
a galop, an especiallly rhythmic and
violent kind of dance in 2/4 time. Offenbach probably would not
have called it a can can, although that dance had originated in working
class Paris some thirty years before the premiere of Orphee. "Can
can" is a French term, which might be translated as "tittle tattle"--
it actually appears in the original libretto for the opera, but not in
reference to a dance. Probably "tittle tattle" implied "scandal"
and because the dance was considered scandalous until the 1890's, it
came to be called "can can" or "scandal." It was originally
performed mostly by men, but by the late nineteenth century, dancers
such as Jane Avril, famous in Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, had made it a
woman's solo dance. (She had a heart sown on her underwear for
the final turn to the audience where the skirt is thrown up-- the coup
du cul.) In Britain it remained scandalous much longer than in
France, and early editions of the Oxford
Companion
of
Music included
it, while prudishly averring that "its exact nature is unknown to
anyone connected to this Companion." Offenbach and his librettist
satirized the attitude to the dance when they have Jupiter, being an
old fashioned sort, preferring the minuet, perhaps to appease Public
Opinion; but the other gods are bored with the minuet; it's like
ambrosia. What's needed is wine-- and a "can can."
One local reviewer of the Central City show complained that Orpheus needs updating because we don't know our mythology any more. Well, tant pis for him! The audience loved it and if we don't know our mythology anymore, we certainly don't know the figures and social milieu that Offenbach was mocking in the Second Empire in France, with its bored aristocracy always having affairs and its growing bourgeoisie, looking more and more like the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Most interesting is Public Opinion, that guardian of morality. She is a very modern character, something of a cross between the Family Foundation and public relations. You don't need to know anything about the Second Empire or mythology for that matter to find Orpheus funny, because underneath it all we are laughing at ourselves. We are the bourgeoisie and we find endless fascination in the sexual peccadillos of our aristocracy and celebrities.
Orphee aux Enfers was so successful in Paris and in the world beyond that in 1874 Offenbach expanded it into four acts with a huge cast for a much larger theater, the Gaité. The orchestra was expanded too and several ballets were added as well as some new songs. The stage action was much more spectacular, in a way that the little Bouffes could not have handled. The new version was a success too, and almost twice as long as the old one. Critics noted that the earlier version was sharper and wittier, while the later one is sweeter and a safer entertainment. (The famous overture, a potpourri based on tunes from the opera, was not used in the earlier version and is not by Offenbach.)
Central City used essentially the earlier, shorter version, with some additions from the 1874 version which have become just as famous as the songs in the 1858 version (but not the ballets). It was translated into English, a very racy English, by Jeremy Sams and for once I was glad to hear the many double entendres in English and not the French original. A local paper complained about the bawdiness, but I can't imagine that the reviewer had ever read Aristophanes. The little we know about the origins of comedy in ancient Greece tells us that burlesquing the gods was part and parcel of it. And anyone who knows a thing or two about Lysistrata, the most famous of Aristophanes' plays, knows that sex and bawdiness are part and parcel of the humor. The Central City version and indeed the original are very much in the tradition of Aristophanic comedy-- mocking contemporary society and even specific figures in it through satire sometimes placed in heaven (Birds or Clouds) or hell (Thesmophoriazusae). In our day, we don't have to know anything about the Pelopponesian War or the Sicilian Expedition to laugh out loud at the sexual romp in Lysistrata or the mocking of gods we no longer believe in in several plays. Orpheus in the Underworld is just such a romp and the orgy which ends Lysistrata is just the same as the orgy that ends Orpheus. One very important mark of a liberal democracy is the ability, no the necessity, of laughing at our rulers and at our religion(s). Sadly, numerous religions today kill people who mock their gods and others would censure the mockers.
Orpheus not only mocks mythology and society, but music too. Offenbach quotes the most famous aria from Gluck's ultra serious Orphée et Eurydice ("J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" in the French version)-- which makes all the gods sad-- but he also gets digs in against the courtly music of Rameau (the minuet), and in the gods' chorus of rebellion, when they want to go to Hades with Jupiter, there are quotes from the Marseillaise. Art does not escape the satirist's fine pen either!
The cast in Central City was up to the task. Especially good was the sexy Eurydice of Joanna Mongiardo, who managed the tricky coloratura with aplomb, and the Pluto of Ryan MacPherson. In the true ensemble tradition, however, everyone stood out. Curt Olds' John Styx was hilarious, in his drunken forgetful ways (punning on the waters of Lethe as the true "Milk of Amnesia"), and Jupiter was equally amusing (Matthew Worth). I loved the costumes by Sara Jean Tosetti, especially the fly-Jupiter with its huge red fly eyes and golden wings. Stage direction was by Marc Astafan, who did such a fine job last year in the very different Rinaldo of Handel; this Offenbach was just as well directed and paced. If I had to fault anything it would be the orchestra, which did not always sustain the necessary brio. The conductor we saw was Andrew Altenbach, a substitute for the usual Martin Andre.
To end this, I will quote John Styx, the servant who so wants Eurydice to ring for him again (like Pluto and Jupiter he is lecherous towards her): "If you ring my bell, I'll come like a shot." That, for the French "si madame sonnait, j'accourrai...." That is all you need to know about what you could get away with in 1858 and what makes the audience laugh to day: the sense is the same, but we are more explicit in our punning. Cue the "can can"!
Orpheus has been a hit since it first opened in another small theater, in Paris, the Bouffes-Parisiens, on October 21, 1858. Ostensibly it makes fun of classical mythology and especially the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here Orpheus and his wife are a bored, middle-class married couple. He teaches violin and the little woman has started an affair with a local shepherd, Aristaeus, who is really Pluto in disguise. Orpheus' youthful desire to be an artist has given way to the middle-aged ennui of teaching music lessons to girls, some of whom he is sleeping with, if Eurydice is to be believed.
Central City Opera’s ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD (2010). Edward Mout (Orpheus) and
Joanna Mongiardo (Eurydice). Photo by Mark Kiryluk.
Public Opinion is actually a character in the show. She introduces the action and drives the story. When Eurydice is bitten by a viper and dies (a design by Pluto to get her to the Underworld), Orpheus is ecstatic. He is rid of the ball and chain at last! But Public Opinion makes him go after her: the seriousness of mythology-- and marriage-- cannot be mocked! When Jupiter discovers that Pluto has abducted Eurydice, he vows to go to Hades to check it out. Public Opinion must be served; gods can't just go around abducting mortal girls. Of course all the bored gods on Olympus want to go too. A holiday! Hell sounds like such fun. They have wine and wild boar and dancing there. So much more exciting than Olympus with its steady and unvaried diet of ambrosia and sleep.
So, Act II takes place in the Underworld, Pluto's realm, which curiously and appropriately resembles a casino in the Central City production, where we find that Eurydice is a prisoner and we meet a new character, her servant and jailer, John Styx. That's right: John; it's "John," not Jean in the French libretto too. John Styx is from Boetia and his famous song is "Quand j'etais roi de Beotie," repeated ad naseum to hilarious effect. In ancient Greek comedy, Boetia was the sticks and people from there were considered hicks by the sophisticated Athenians. Is it any wonder that the French librettists gave this Boetian an English name? To a Parisian in 1858, Engiand was the cultural sticks and the English were hicks from the sticks or Styx, as the case may be: the nineteenth century Parisian's Boetia. Paris, of course, was the Center of Everything.
Soon Jupiter finds Eurydice and he finds her just as charming and pretty as Pluto did. Now we all know that Jupiter was forever turning himself into things (swans, bulls, showers of gold) in order to seduce mortal girls. But really! A fly? In the opera Jupiter turns himself into a giant and golden fly and has a duet with Eurydice in which all he sings is "buzzz"; physically he does a lot of buzzing around too, and this Jupiter-Fly wore a huge codpiece that made all that buzzing pretty explicit. Soon he hatches a plot with Eurydice so that she will come away with him. Eury, who is a social climber, thinks that Jupiter would make a more prestigious lover than Pluto, who was one up on Orpheus. That night there will be a party in Hell, Jupie tells Eury, and they can escape at its height.
The final scene is the party and it proves that everyone has more fun in Hell, just as G.B. Shaw said a half century later in Man and Superman. (Naturally it took the backwards English much longer to discover that Hell is more fun than it had the with-it Parisians.) Pluto is on to the plot however, and is trying to figure out how to thwart it when Orpheus arrives with Public Opinion in order to uphold the dignity of Mythology and Marriage and take Eurydice back. Pluto was starting to get bored anyway; why, he might as well be a husband! Jupie decrees that Orpheus can take her back to the living, but he can't look at her until he gets her out-- who knows where that caveat comes from-- it's "inexplicable," he tells us. It's not up to mortals to understand the ways of the gods! When it looks like Orpheus is actually going to obey, Jupiter throws a thunderbolt and Orpheus looks back. Eurydice disappears. Mythology is upheld! But not to worry. Jupiter turns Eury into a Bacchante and the whole thing ends in one of the most famous tunes to come out of "Classical" music: the "infernal Galop," universally known to posterity as the "French Can Can."
Central City Opera’s ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD (2010). Joanna Mongiardo (Eurydice) and
the Can-can Girls (L to R: Kaitlyn Costello, Alisa Jordheim, Kelly Hill). Photo by Kira Horvath.
One local reviewer of the Central City show complained that Orpheus needs updating because we don't know our mythology any more. Well, tant pis for him! The audience loved it and if we don't know our mythology anymore, we certainly don't know the figures and social milieu that Offenbach was mocking in the Second Empire in France, with its bored aristocracy always having affairs and its growing bourgeoisie, looking more and more like the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Most interesting is Public Opinion, that guardian of morality. She is a very modern character, something of a cross between the Family Foundation and public relations. You don't need to know anything about the Second Empire or mythology for that matter to find Orpheus funny, because underneath it all we are laughing at ourselves. We are the bourgeoisie and we find endless fascination in the sexual peccadillos of our aristocracy and celebrities.
Orphee aux Enfers was so successful in Paris and in the world beyond that in 1874 Offenbach expanded it into four acts with a huge cast for a much larger theater, the Gaité. The orchestra was expanded too and several ballets were added as well as some new songs. The stage action was much more spectacular, in a way that the little Bouffes could not have handled. The new version was a success too, and almost twice as long as the old one. Critics noted that the earlier version was sharper and wittier, while the later one is sweeter and a safer entertainment. (The famous overture, a potpourri based on tunes from the opera, was not used in the earlier version and is not by Offenbach.)
Central City used essentially the earlier, shorter version, with some additions from the 1874 version which have become just as famous as the songs in the 1858 version (but not the ballets). It was translated into English, a very racy English, by Jeremy Sams and for once I was glad to hear the many double entendres in English and not the French original. A local paper complained about the bawdiness, but I can't imagine that the reviewer had ever read Aristophanes. The little we know about the origins of comedy in ancient Greece tells us that burlesquing the gods was part and parcel of it. And anyone who knows a thing or two about Lysistrata, the most famous of Aristophanes' plays, knows that sex and bawdiness are part and parcel of the humor. The Central City version and indeed the original are very much in the tradition of Aristophanic comedy-- mocking contemporary society and even specific figures in it through satire sometimes placed in heaven (Birds or Clouds) or hell (Thesmophoriazusae). In our day, we don't have to know anything about the Pelopponesian War or the Sicilian Expedition to laugh out loud at the sexual romp in Lysistrata or the mocking of gods we no longer believe in in several plays. Orpheus in the Underworld is just such a romp and the orgy which ends Lysistrata is just the same as the orgy that ends Orpheus. One very important mark of a liberal democracy is the ability, no the necessity, of laughing at our rulers and at our religion(s). Sadly, numerous religions today kill people who mock their gods and others would censure the mockers.
Orpheus not only mocks mythology and society, but music too. Offenbach quotes the most famous aria from Gluck's ultra serious Orphée et Eurydice ("J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" in the French version)-- which makes all the gods sad-- but he also gets digs in against the courtly music of Rameau (the minuet), and in the gods' chorus of rebellion, when they want to go to Hades with Jupiter, there are quotes from the Marseillaise. Art does not escape the satirist's fine pen either!
The cast in Central City was up to the task. Especially good was the sexy Eurydice of Joanna Mongiardo, who managed the tricky coloratura with aplomb, and the Pluto of Ryan MacPherson. In the true ensemble tradition, however, everyone stood out. Curt Olds' John Styx was hilarious, in his drunken forgetful ways (punning on the waters of Lethe as the true "Milk of Amnesia"), and Jupiter was equally amusing (Matthew Worth). I loved the costumes by Sara Jean Tosetti, especially the fly-Jupiter with its huge red fly eyes and golden wings. Stage direction was by Marc Astafan, who did such a fine job last year in the very different Rinaldo of Handel; this Offenbach was just as well directed and paced. If I had to fault anything it would be the orchestra, which did not always sustain the necessary brio. The conductor we saw was Andrew Altenbach, a substitute for the usual Martin Andre.
To end this, I will quote John Styx, the servant who so wants Eurydice to ring for him again (like Pluto and Jupiter he is lecherous towards her): "If you ring my bell, I'll come like a shot." That, for the French "si madame sonnait, j'accourrai...." That is all you need to know about what you could get away with in 1858 and what makes the audience laugh to day: the sense is the same, but we are more explicit in our punning. Cue the "can can"!