Today, for only the second time in my career as a concertgoer and opera fan, I walked out of an opera before it was over.
In fact I walked out before it was half over.
In fact I walked out at the end of Act I.
The opera was Wagner's Siegfried, the production that of Washington (D.C.) National Opera.
The last time I walked out of an opera was in March, 1986, when my pal Charlie Berigan and I took to our heels following the second act of Handel's Samson at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The staging was just so downright silly that we decided we'd had enough.
But that time we walked out of purely aesthetic considerations. This time was different. This time I was both disgusted and offended.
I bought my ticket for this matinee performance last September. I waited eight months to see it. Then, on the very morning of the day I was to go to the opera, someone from the Wagner Society of Washington circulated the New York Times' review, written by Anthony Thommasini. It begins like this:
"WASHINGTON — Like many companies, the Washington National Opera is presenting its new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in installments over several seasons. But financial setbacks, now everyday news in the performing arts, have forced the company to stretch out the schedule of its “Ring,” directed by Francesca Zambello in a co-production with the San Francisco Opera, much further than planned.
The company’s new “Siegfried,” the third opera in the cycle, opened at the Kennedy Center on May 2, three years after the first, “Das Rheingold.” The “Ring” will not be presented complete until 2013. But this “Siegfried,” seen here on Thursday night, was worth waiting for.
Ms. Zambello and her creative team, especially the set designer Michael Yeargan, are interpreting Wagner’s epic through the lens of American mythology and iconography. The “Ring” is presented as a class conflict between the haves and the have-nots."
Now, if I had seen this review in time, I would have put my ticket for this production up for sale on eBay. I go to the opera to hear music and experience drama, not to be preached at about politics. Especially not Marxist politics. Are these people kidding? There is nothing fresh, innovative or cutting-edge about loading up a Ring of the Nibelungs production with nonsense about "class struggle." It's been done before. Lots of times.
Maybe director Francesca Zambello didn't get the memo, but this is the ninth year of the 21st century, not the 68th year of the 20th.
Evidently New York Times reviewer Thommasini didn't get the memo either, although it shouldn't surprise me that the relentlessly left-wing New York Times would respond to "Marxist" Wagner, even 50 years after "Marxist" Wagner was anything new, the way the New York Times responds to anything "Marxist:" by jumping up and down squealing and hyperventilating like an excited pom-pom girl at a Pop Warner football game.
I went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing Arts not knowing quite what to expect. But I had a ticket in my pocket for which I'd paid $102 last year, and I wasn't about to just waste it.
But when the curtain went up on Act I, my worst fears were realized.
God, I wish somebody, somehow would do something about snotty, self-important theatrical directors who feel compelled to take classic works of art and stage productions of them aimed at communicating some political or moral message that originated in the mind of the director, not the author. Some message the director wants the audience to get. Directors should tell people where to stand and whether or not to cry when they deliver their lines. They should not take the work in question and use it as a soapbox for their own political beliefs.
Hence, the set of Act I of Siegfried, a tale set in mythic times among dark forests, with Nordic heroes, gods and giants wielding magic swords and whatnot, resembled the set of the old NBC sitcom Sanford and Son. Mime, the dwarf who dreams of stealing the mythic ring and the hoard of gold that goes with it for himself, is depicted as living in some sort of east Los Angeles junkyard, littered with gas cans, lawn chairs, piles of scrap metal and the bombed-out trailer that he apparently sleeps in. There's an old gas stove in front of the trailer that he cooks on, a la life in a 1930s hobo jungle. (Steinbeck!) As if all of that detail didn't make the "message" heavy-handed enough, looming in the background were gigantic images of an electric power corridor. (Industry!)
How absurd to have Wagner's characters singing about forging swords and slaying dragons on a set that would more appropriately have accomodated rival street gangs going at each other with guns and knives.
As greasy hero Siegfried, and then the god Wotan disguised just as greasily as "The Wanderer," enter and exit during Act I, they repeatedly go to Mime's bombed-out trailer to get bottles of something, presumably good, proletarian beer, out of the refrigerator, from which they swig while they deliver their lines. All this scene needed was Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in his "wife-beater" shirt, yelling "Stella!"
Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? As I watched this idiocy unfold, I kept thinking of the first night I attended the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. During the Soviet period of Russia's history, the stage of the Bolshoi Theater was crested, proudly and in full view for all to see, with a gigantic profile of Lenin and a just-as-gigantic red Soviet hammer-and-sickle. Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle have long since been removed from the Bolshoi, as they are no longer anything of what modern Russia is all about.
In terms of sheer subtlety, that picture of Lenin and that hammer-and-sickle were all this production lacked. Perhaps Ms. Zambello contacted the Bolshoi to see if she could borrow Lenin and the hammer-and-sickle, and, given how cutting edge her vision is, she was no doubt shocked and dismayed to find that they had been long since discarded. Too bad for her.
It is almost beyond belief how anyone in the 21st century could take seriously a "Marxist" spin on Wagner, or anything else for that matter that wasn't intended as "Marxist" to begin with. Pretty hard to keep a Bertolt Brecht play non-Marxist, which is probably why you don't see or hear too much of Brecht anymore, but Wagner? Sure, he was one of the 1848 revolutionaries, but that didn't make him a Marxist, and certainly not a Leninist. And it's no excuse at all for muddle-headed aging romantics (I call them "the bald-headed ponytail crowd") who just can't let go of their tie-dyed Che Guevara T-shirts, carte blanche to go on for decade after decade using the Ring to flog a horse that, whether they like it or not, is dead.
for Mr. Thommasini and Ms. Zambello and all of the others who didn't get the memo, the USSR rolled over and died nearly 20 years ago. Even the supposedly "communist" Chinese have embraced their own somewhat bizarre relationship with free-market capitalism. The whole notion of class struggle, of "haves" and "have nots" locked into a quantifiable and scientifically-scannable preordained fight-to-the-death is as hopelessly 19th century an idea as perpetual motion or phrenology. I repeat: are these people kidding? Does anyone, in the year 2009, seriously believe in Marxism anymore, an idea which is no longer even "last century," but now, "the-century-before?"
I'm all for updating Wagner. But while we're trying to be up-to-date, let's keep in mind that some things that seemed "up-to-date" when the Beatles were still making records are anything but up-to-date now. "Marxist" Wagner? This can only be about my fellow baby-boomers' nostalgia for the Woodstock era.
Oops, I've said it. Next we'll see a production of Der Rosenkavalier set at a 1960s hippie rock festival.
Hopefully I'll see the reviews before I waste my money on a seat.
No comments:
Post a Comment