January 07, 2007: Everything is no Longer Beautiful at the Ballet

Regular readers, as well as those surveying my current Tag Cloud, have probably detected my interest in opera; and, here in San Francisco, that interest is well satisfied by the San Francisco Opera. As is often the case, our Opera House divides it time, roughly equally, between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. So I am frequently asked if I spend as much time at San Francisco Ballet performances as I devote to the Opera. I have answered this question in the negative so many times that I think I am now well-enough rehearsed to express it in text!

Those who know more about my than Google is ever likely to reveal know that, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I was fanatical about the dance, writing regularly for Boston After Dark and sending dispatched from Boston to Dance Magazine. New York was the place to be for such fanaticism, but Boston was not that bad. In fact, it was in a used bookstore in Boston (one of the best places to gather material about dance history) that I first met Leslie Getz, who probably had the most awesome collection of dance-related literature I had ever seen, all in an apartment in Palo Alto! Leslie was the one who taught me the aphorism of dance history that shaped much of my personal aesthetic: Fokine was the Father, Balanchine was the Son, and Ashton was the Holy Ghost. Two other choreographers eventually shared close proximity with this "holy trinity:" Anthony Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

On the popular front this was a time when Jerome Robbins was attracting a good deal of attention, particularly after the impact of West Side Story. He came up through the ranks of the early efforts in American ballet choreography; and, at a time when I would drive from Boston to New York every chance I had to catch the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, his "Afternoon of a Faun" was a fixture in the company repertoire. Similarly, Ballet Theater would do his "Les Noces" regularly. With all this as context, Robbins decided to "return to his roots" by introducing "Dances at a Gathering," a near-epic setting of Chopin piano music, complete with an on-stage pianist. (If imitation is the greatest form of flattery and parody the highest art of imitation, then the greatest honor to Robbins' effort came when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo added "Yes Virginia, Another Piano Ballet" to their repertoire!) I was never particularly happy with Robbins working at this scale (I was even less happy when he tried to take on the "Goldberg Variations"); but this was where the "buzz" was (even if we did not use that noun in those days).

Run the time-line closer to the present when I discovered that San Francisco Ballet was going to include "Dances at a Gathering" in one of their seasons. My wife had never seen it; but she was curious about the company and had a lot more enthusiasm for Chopin than I usually do. I had not seen the company since 1967, when they had visited Jacob's Pillow; and they had gone through a lot of changes since then. So we went, and I am afraid that it did not take me long to start grumbling. What I began to realize was that the days of my fanatical interest in dance were actually the "twilight period" of the "good old days;" and it was unclear when the sun would next rise.

Back in those days, of course, one could not live by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Cunningham alone; but the alternatives could be pretty disappointing. Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino tended to have the strongest hold on consistently putting out disappointing stuff. Time magazine may have been excited about Joffrey's "Astarte;" but all I ever remembered was the way in which the cyclorama had an erection! Nevertheless, even the most rabid fans would still go to see the Joffrey Ballet because they performed "The Green Table;" and they did it very well, probably because the original choreographer, Kurt Joos had an active had in its reconstruction. Also, when we could not go to "live" performances, we would seek out movie revival houses, not just for old ballet films but for Hollywood musicals with "real" choreography in them. Balanchine frequently confessed to being a great admirer of Astaire, and you do not have to watch many of the RKO films with Ginger to see why.

So why is there now such a long dark night of an art form I once loved so passionately? The best explanation I can give is that it all comes down to energy. From the evidence I have gathered, "The Green Table" is a perfect example because Joos understood the role of energy in both theory (some of which he apparently got from Laban) and practice. Both Astaire and Kelly were masters of energy control; and, in Astaire's case, that came in through his very conception of choreography. Every now and then I see a choreographer (such as Forsythe) who seems to understand the role of energy; but that understanding does not matter very much if the dancer's can't "get it." Here in San Francisco I really could not fault the local company on any of the steps in "Dances at a Gathering" (particularly since, given the volume of them, my memory was not that strong); but my grumbling all had to do with the fact that I experienced no sense at all of how to control energy in order to turn the steps into dance.

Will this trend change? That is impossible to predict. When Balanchine came to the United States, no one expected that American ballet would rise to a level that had been associated almost exclusively with its Russian heritage; but, between Lincoln Center, City Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York could justifiably claim to be the Dance Capital of the World. Perhaps it will regain that title. Perhaps San Francisco will make a serious play for it. More likely, however, we now live in a digital culture with far less admiration for such performing arts, which means that the best we can hope for is that any records we have of any of those art forms be properly preserved for posterity!

December 02, 2006: Psychoanalysis at the Opera

Following the final matinee of their current production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the San Francisco Opera is joining forces with two members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, Linda Lagemann and Milton Schaefer, for "an exciting psychoanalytic discussion" of the opera. Now I am in favor of anything that helps opera audiences to pay more attention to what is happening (either on the stage or in the pit); so I would have preferred such a discussion to take place before the final performance. However, where this particular opera is involved, it is worth asking these analysts just whose psyche they plan to analyze.

Opera fans know that two operas in the standard repertoire have been written about Manon. The really rabid fans probably also know that Puccini's publisher went to great lengths to make sure that Puccini's project would be substantially different from the earlier opera by Massenet, since that earlier production had become a major hit in the opera world. Anyone with this background probably knows that Manon was the creation of the Abbé Prévost. What is probably less well known is that the "novel" Manon Lescaut is actually Books V through XI of Mémoires d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde. I have never encountered this work in its entirety, nor met anyone who has done so. I am not even sure of the total number of Books in it, but I think I found one source that said it was twelve. The general consensus it that the whole thing is a rather tedious autobiographical meditation (confessional?), which would have been totally forgotten had not the Manon portion been extracted and become one of the most heavily-sold books of all time in France.

This is where things get interesting. First of all it would appear that Manon is based on one of Prévost's own (probably unhappy) memories. She may even have been the reason he decided to withdraw from the world. Secondly, Prévost's text, because it is autobiographical, is a first-person narrative. The account of Manon is told by the young "man of quality" who was smitten by here, the Chevalier Des Grieux. So, if we are going to talk about psyches, the first question we need to ask is whether or not Des Grieux is a reliable narrator. My guess is that he is not. I would bet that Prévost lusted after some peasant girl in his callow youth, never mustered up the courage to talk to her, and wove an elaborate story around her instead. In other words Manon stands in relation to Des Grieux/Prévost somewhat the way Dulcinea stands in relation to Don Quixote. However, Prévost is more interested in the primrose path to perdition than in chivalry; so Manon becomes the instrument of his cautionary tale.

I would now guess that Puccini never bothered to think about such details. Indeed, the documentary evidence seems to indicate that he was a smitten with Manon and Des Grieux was. So here he is taking on the fictitious product of an unreliable narrator (and, while this was one of his earlier works, I find more depth in the music than in his more warhorse-like operas). So who belongs on the analyst's couch?

Puccini is my number-one candidate. Anyone who can get that wrapped up in an imaginary character has got to have a psyche worth investigating! I would even argue that, at the end of the day, Puccini is probably a far more interesting figure that either Des Grieux or his creator Prévost. Indeed, if we could get to the bottom of Puccini's obsession with Manon in youth, we might have a better understanding of why, at the end of his life, he decided to take on the suitor-killing Turandot!

October 06, 2006: There's More to Opera than the Music!

For the better part of this decade the San Francisco press seems to have enjoyed invoking the term "Eurotrash" when writing about productions at the San Francisco Opera. For the most part this seems to have indicated a reactionary trend based on the precept that the staging should not get in the way of the music, particularly the performances of the singers that the public has paid good money to hear. Now Philip Gossett has written a 675-page book (Divas and Scholars) about the practice of producing opera in the first half of the nineteenth century; and Charles Rosen has reviewed the book for The New York Review. Given his background (as both scholar and performer), one can understand Rosen's inclination to place music above all; but I came away from his review feeling he might be the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Gossett seems to have tried to capture what the work practices were in the period he studied; but, since he provided more than enough musical grist for Rosen's mill, Rosen could evade any of the issues Gossett raises about the actual people who composed (and designed) and performed (and directed).

All this relates to Eurotrash, because that word seems to have become the catch-all for describing controversial stagings of opera (probably even when the director is not European, as is the case with Peter Sellars). Gossett offers a sensible comment about how Verdi might have reacted to such practices:

Verdi's reaction to any such controversy would have been to look at the box-office receipts. We could do worse.

Indeed, but Rosen is not content to leave well enough alone:

I do not think that Verdi would have found good receipts sufficient compensation for the 2001 production of Un Ballo in Maschera in Barcelona that featured the conspirators sitting on toilets and the introduction of an irrelevant homosexual rape.

To address the second point first, if the rape victim was Oscar, then I would need to know more before making a judgment call on its relevance, since there seem to be many who adhere to the idea that Oscar was sort of a Ganymede to Gustav's Jupiter. So, if we really want to portray the conspirators as bad guys (rather than, say, political dissidents), then it makes sense to give them some nasty things to do. This takes us to the first point: If they are going to do nasty things, you may as well give them some nasty settings, such as toilets. In semiotic language what we are seeing are some staging decisions that are connotative, and Rosen's reaction seems to be that we opera lovers can live on denotation alone. My own feeling is that, if a stage director knows how to use connotation effectively, more power to him!

Rosen then decides to depart from the track of Gossett's book in order to riff on da capo arias in Handel, probably because there has been an abundance of imaginative and outrageous ways to stage an extended piece of music that may or may not distract from the technical virtuosity of the singer. Since nothing matters but the music to Rosen, he is indignant that

you cannot make a "da capo" aria tell a story. Because of its formal structure, you can only impose a story on it by actions or gestures which are completely extraneous to the music: the return of the A section can be more intense, but that is not a narrative device but an emotional and lyrical one, and it requires no action or gesture but only great singing.

Again, this misses the point, because Rosen wishes to examine the aria in isolation from its context. Once we take context into account, we recognize that the aria is embedded in a narrative structure. One might say that it's function is to reflect on "where things stand" in that structure (and the text being sung is usually pretty explicit about that). Repeating the A section returns the audience from the reflection to the narrative. I would have thought that Rosen knew enough narrative theory to see this point, but he seems to have been wearing his musical blinders when he wrote his review.

This takes us to my final example, equally narrow in its scope:

A staging should arise from the music.

If an aria is a reflection on "where things stand" at a particular moment in the progress of the narrative, then a good staging can reflect on the entire narrative. In so doing it can also provide the audience with a specific point of view. Consider the Ballo example: Are the conspirators malicious thugs; or are they "freedom fighters?" Remember, the assassination of Gustav was so controversial that the libretto had to be reworked to change the setting to Colonial Boston. As a result of that revision, the leading conspirators were renamed "Sam" and "Tom." When that version is done in the United States, we have a tendency to associate those names with Adams and Paine and may not be that grieved when the colonial governor (AKA Gustav III) is assassinated. None of this ever gets translated into musical terms; but, in spite of Rosen's puritan stance, any staging that did not take problems of point-of-view into account would be lacking (or at least reduced to a concert performance by the soloists with some superfluous activity).