FAITH CRISIS OPERA: MIDSUMMER!

It all comes down to a leap of faith. Art has that much in common with religion; that’s why people get so passionate about it. They go to war and kill each other over matters of religion, but art provides many with their ultimate emotional experiences–something which I imagine you cannot have if there’s no faith involved.

I’ve never been much for faith, myself, raised as I was in an American mezzo-nothing atheist-agnostic household, and never one to be overbold with self-confidence. (That’s one of the workings of faith, too.) I’ve always preferred certainty, security based on logic and/or perception. So it occasionally happens that I lose faith, too, in art, since it’s pretty much an illogical enterprise. Theater depends on the suspension of disbelief; the audience’s faith in the story-teller. Without that, theater is impossible and story-telling mere Freudian neurosis and narcissism: "Pay attention to me! I matter!" And if your chief livelihood is the theater, a crisis of faith in it is a problem. And that’s where I was getting, these past few months working in the theater.

How can we KNOW for sure that our work is meaningful? Art is so subjective; one person may love what another hates. I may put on a show, tell a story, which means one thing to me; and the audience may find in it a completely different meaning, even one which I reject and deny. A few months back, I received plaudits from all quarters for my translation of a comic opera we were producing; was it ungrateful of me to find the general enthusiasm for all the cheap laughs I was getting disheartening, since it seemed to me no one was appreciating the more subtle and interesting parts of the show? Probably. I should probably have known by now, many years into this career, that if you open it up to cheap laughs, you force the public to relax their attention for the width of those wide jokes. A camel can pass through the eye of a needle; but if a thread goes through immediately after, no one will notice–even if it’s the most gorgeous silken thread ever spun.

Several such experiences in a row–perceived misfires, or honest-to-goodness misfires, disappointments in the actual craft going on in the theater led to something of a faith-crisis. But the rest of it came from the curious nature of the work we do, in the worlds of opera education and marketing in the US.

It’s two slightly different worlds, both necessary, both operating along the same gradient of audience interface. Here’s a good way to visualize the difference: in marketing, the idea is to convince the public that the show is so good, they’re gonna have such a great time, they should put down their money and buy a ticket. In education, either you’re working with schools, which are their own strange kettle of fish; or you’re working with people who’ve already been through the marketing gauntlet, have already parted with their money, and who come to education in the hopes that we can make sure they have an even better time by helping them understand the show. In education, our job has always been and is kind of easy, since they really want us to help them. They’re eager to have a good time, they’ve already made a big commitment to the art form by shelling out the money for the ticket. It’s not hard to do opera education, although it may be hard to do it WELL. In fact, there’s not much consensus on what ‘WELL’ might mean in this odd industry.

On the other hand, it’s increasingly hard, in America, to market opera. Most Americans don’t really understand what opera is, how to approach it, how it works, or why it is interesting and valuable. That’s why education is so key–we’re better situated, than marketing, to explain all these things. The problem is, marketing, in our media-world, must work in tiny blips of information: ads, sound bytes, slogans. And the education we’re talking about simply cannot happen in such abbreviated forms. An opera education event is typically a lecture of an hour to an hour and a half (too long for the human animal to sit still and receive, we know, but LIFE IS SHORT/OPERA IS LONG) or a written piece of at least 2500 words. A marketing piece, by contrast, is an ad with less than 100 words or a commercial about a minute long. So you can see what we’re up against: round pegs and square holes. Trying to jam them in is exhausting and futile, and can easily lead to a crisis of confidence.

In Europe, I notice from my travels, the situation is somehow totally different. You can see it in the marketing materials themselves–although restricted to the same minute scale as ours, they dare to cram in more educational material. They assume more knowledge on the part of their public, they aren’t paranoid that the public is a) going to feel inadequate if there’s something in the art or the marketing which they don’t understand or b) going to hate them for making them feel inadequate. Those who can deal, will; those who can’t, well, let’s not worry about them, it’s their loss, and besides the government will help out with the finances. Our government won’t help; the majority of the people would be hard put to deal; and it’s everybody’s loss.

Because it will deny us, in the end, experiences like the one I had Thursday night–the climax of my trip, couldn’t have planned it more perfectly, an evening in the theater which almost renewed my faith in the magic and wonder of this enterprise: Britten’s MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at Glyndebourne, at last an unequivocally terrific production of an opera which sends me into raptures. With your kind indulgence, my rapture-rhapsody:

To start with, Glyndebourne itself is a very special place. Richard Wagner’s fantasy come to life in East Sussex; a small opera festival, out in the middle of nowhere, putting on definitive productions of great operas. Founded in the 1930s by a wealthy, eccentric Englishman with a big country house, it developed over the 70 years since into one of the great opera houses of the world as well as (like Ascot) one of the great bastions of an old-fashioned English upper class world. It’s really expensive, it’s hard to get tickets if you’re not hoi poloi, and basically all the men are in tuxes every night, and the ladies dressed to match. The first time I ever came to Glyndebourne, years ago, I was about to begin the American Revolutionary War all over again–every populist, democratic, socialist vibe in me rose up in horror at the privilege, the elitism, the way this institution seemed hell-bent on maintaining social inequities, a marked difference between the haves and have-nots. England, I knew from study, was like that, has been able to get away with it ever since Magna Carta in a way that doesn’t seem to work in the rest of the world. And although I’ve always loved England and found the place irresistibly fascinating, politically I’ve always been suspicious of it and this element of it in particular.

But by intermission, that first day at Glyndebourne, I was won over. Because I understood for the first time what justification such an aristocracy might have–that it really is about good living, not about excluding anybody. Enjoying–and sharing–what is best in life. I was blown away, not just by the quality of everything–the beauty of the grounds, the fabulous food at our picnic, the interesting conversations, the excellence of the music and the drama, the fine qualities of the theater itself–but by the gracious hospitality which included me in everything. No elitism met me, a brash young American with bad manners and a most unfortunate suit, but rather a truly regal welcome, and I finally understood the workings of the feudal system: I thought, if some king or nobleman ever treated me this well, back in the day, then yeah! I’d sure want to serve them. Or technically, her–it was Katie Tearle, Glyndebourne’s fabulous Education Director, who welcomed me with queenly grace and whom I’ve never ceased to admire. My experience with her helped me understand, to some extent, what it is with the Brits and their queens: Victoria, the Elizabeths, Thatcher. I only wish the Copenhagen RING had been about this question, what about those women who rule so well, instead of lamenting how Alberich and Wotan and all of us men have managed to screw things up so badly. Sidenote on this interesting topic–right now, in Washington State, our three top elected officials are all women: Governor Christine Gregoire and Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. And all democrats. Take that, Denmark!

I’ve been back to Glyndebourne twice since, and each time is a renewal–a re-commitment to striving for the best in opera, for the ultimate in opera education, and for some of this British virtue, so foreign to me: hospitality with regal grace. I know I continue to do a crappy job of this, in Seattle, but I am at least conscious of the fact, and thus am on the road to someday doing it better. We had a practice run last night, hosting our own picnic–with Katie Tearle as guest, this time!

The three queens doing the hosting, in this case Thursday night, were a lovely trio of nixies–or maybe we were more like the Norns–myself, my friend Andrew, who’d been hosting me in London, and my friend Stephen, who lives in Seattle. Andy and I met four years ago at a closing night party after an opera in London, where he’d been in the chorus; originally a Kiwi, he moved to London eight years ago, has done a fair amount of singing, and is currently selling real estage. (Think Hugo Weaving in BEDROOMS AND HALLWAYS.) Stephen and I met many years ago through his mother, a queen in her own way, one of the Founding Mothers of Seattle Opera. Anyways, we had organized a picnic rather haphazardly, with lots of emails, text messages, and interrupted phone calls (if you’re a Cingular customer, like me, don’t bother with International Roaming, it’s a gyp). Andy and I up in London first grabbed lots of desserts (always start with dessert)–chocolate torte, fresh English strawberries and cream, an assortment of weird cheeses–and way more than enough Persecco, a Venetian substitute for champagne. We rented a little car and drove down to Brighton, where we found Stephen and his friend Pam (who lives there); they had arranged chicken, rice salad, pasta salad, bread with lots of kinds of hummus, an assortment of olives, little seafood hors d’oeuvres (shrimp & crab concoctions). And green salad. So needless to say, we were sitting more than pretty for the intermission (they call it the ‘interval’), which was 85 minutes long (typical at Glyndebourne). We had a nice little spot where we spread our blanket, on a swath or sward of grass in between the recently-dredged lake and a hillside covered in grazing sheep. And there we ate and drank (had so much Persecco we never even opened the Pinot or the Grappa; with Kiwi resourcefulness Andy had rigged a multi-bottle cooler out of a trash can and a bag of ice) and caught up. Stephen had just finished his Baltic Tour as I was on my Wagner tour; he went from Copenhagen to Stockholm, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg). We also spent much of the interval enthusing about the marvellous production.

There was one nay-sayer, and I should explain his point of view before continuing my rhapsody. This was another random encounter, he and his wife happened to be in the area visiting her father-in-law; he’s a well-known opera director with whom I’ve often worked in Seattle and for whom I have the deepest respect–one of the greatest theater artists I know, really. He wasn’t particularly enjoying the show; he felt the production was a bit ‘twee’, as they say in merrie olde England. Well, never ask a soprano about another soprano, and never expect a director to say anything nice about another director’s work. But actually, his criticism ran deeper–he didn’t care for the opera itself. (This opera director has been quite vocal about how much he hates many beloved operas.) It was heartless, he felt; no way for the audience to approach any of the characters, no humanity in it. As soon as he said this I knew what he meant–but I also knew why I loved the opera, and the production, anyway.

This director’s manifesto: "Our job in the theater is to generate as much sympathy as we possibly can, from the audience, for every character onstage." It’s a great manifesto, not necessarily applicable to every kind of drama ever, but a good fundamental truth about theater worth remembering: people go to the theater to leave themselves and enter another reality–theater, I like to say, exercises our compassionate muscles, because it forces us to connect with someone else’s life, to listen to their story, feel their emotions and share those with everybody else in the room.

So why is this a tough project to pull off with the musical drama of Benjamin Britten and the zany comedy of MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM? My director friend was not alone in noticing that there is indeed something brittle, cold, distant about this opera; Andy, who had never before heard it, leaned over to me at the first pause (interval between Acts 2 and 3) to whisper "The music is so CLEVER!" Odd choice of word? No, entirely appropriate. Like much Britten, it’s fiendishly intelligent music; you may need to get it with your brain before you get it with your heart. But when you do, I find, Britten’s music becomes incredibly emotional, deeply sympathetic, and wonderfully easy to love.

I have a long and complicated history with this opera, and could have done a vast Britten Blog instead of a Wagner Blog–except that there already exists an entirely satisfactory movie on Britten, Tony Palmer’s documentary A TIME THERE WAS. Four of my key encounters with MIDSUMMER:

Introduction. My mother’s aunt, who got me into opera when I was a little kid, came to watch me act in a mediocre production of Shakespeare’s MIDSUMMER when I was in college. She was aghast to find that I didn’t know and didn’t love Britten’s operas, and bought me the recording of him conducting MIDSUMMER on the spot. I didn’t much like it, when I first listened to it, and didn’t think about it for many years.

Love. Three years later, at a time when some mischevious fairy had squirted juice on my eyelids, I was in love and encountered MIDSUMMER again at a particularly tender moment in the relationship–the 1996 production at the Met, which emptied the house and which was one of the best shows I’d ever seen at the Met. A great pity, that their audience wasn’t sharing my experience of the show–laughing and crying, with the lovers, the quarreling wedded pair, the teachers and students, boss and employee, and above all with the numbskull idiots trying so hard to create a theatrical illusion, with such mixed results. This time I got the music, got the drama, loved the whole thing with all the love that was pouring from me courtesy of Puck’s magic elixir.

Awake! But the relationship came to an end, and just before my birthday the next year I found myself driving around on the Olympic Peninsula (we’d been planning a getaway into nature, into the Forest of Romance, and like an idiot I didn’t cancel the trip when suddenly I had no one to go with), listening to the top of MIDSUMMER Act 3, music for the slow awakening for Tytania and the four lovers, baffled, wondering, trying to make sense of their experience: "Methought I was enamoured of an ass!" A heart-breaking threnody, a long slow solo violin passage that becomes an eccentric fugue when another violin joins in, way up high–music so beautiful, and lonely, and devastating that I had to turn around and go back to town and find someone to be near. That music was like getting to the very edge of the world for me, peering over the side, and seeing that it is as flat and thin as a piece of paper, and there’s nothing down there. What is on the other side? Only Bottom’s Dream.

A Definitive Performance. How different my experience of MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM the other night at Glyndebourne–older, wiser, familiar with but free of the giddiness and agony of that young love, much more familiar with the opera after years of studying and teaching it and the other Britten operas and being peripherally involved with productions of two of them, BILLY BUDD and TURN OF THE SCREW. (I long to do all the others!) What I always find, with Britten, is there are these moments–motifs ("Ah, Pyramus, my lover dear, thy Thisbe dear and lady dear!"), single lines ("Ah, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!") or brief passages (the quartet of "And I have found Demetrius like a jewel") of such outrageous beauty that as you hear the opera night after night you keep looking forward to these favorite moments and they keep getting better and better. Now, he’s a master of structure and a supremely CLEVER composer–but in the end that’s not what I experience, it’s that accumulation of moments of unbelievable beauty.

Now, to the production! The history is quite interesting; Britten had been involved with Glyndebourne in the initial period, in the mid-40s, and wrote RAPE OF LUCRETIA and ALBERT HERRING as operas for Glyndebourne’s touring company. But there was some kind of a falling out after those two productions (done in 2 brief years)–whether because Glyndebourne objected to Britten’s obvious relationship with Pears or because Britten objected to anyone other than him playing Queen Bee, I don’t know, but they went their separate ways: Glyndebourne became famous as a Mozart house and Britten and Pears headed up the coast to found the Aldeburgh festival, where MIDSUMMER premiered in 1961.

The first Glyndebourne performance of a Britten opera–since 1947–was this MIDSUMMER I saw, by Sir Peter Hall, first produced in 1981. And ever since, Britten has been not just welcome at Glyndebourne–they now have a reputation for being a company that does a really great job with his incredibly challenging works. I heard it right away last night–this was Britten as it is supposed to sound, accurate, warm, lean, taut, every note, every color, every consonant full of beauty and meaning. The conductor, Ilan Volkov, was a young up-and-coming Israeli who knew what he was doing (some of the first scene was a little slow for me); but it was immediately obvious how much Glyndebourne’s fabulous London Philharmonic Orchestra loved and respected this insanely challenging music. Example: each time Puck appears, there’s a wild, elaborate, unpredictable trumpet call. If you play it right, it’s brilliant, but it’s next to impossible to play. Not for last night’s soloist, who nailed the darn thing each and every time. All the elaborate percussion writing was on-target (influenced by Britten’s study of gamelon music); the string solos were so beautiful minds reeled; and the balance was always exactly right. And the singing!

Now, there were no titles, which I found a little surprising at first. The other night, at ENO, they were singing in English (Handel’s ARIODANTE, translated into English) but it was still titled, just like in America. But Glyndebourne is of course right; it is unnecessary and unwise to title Britten’s operas in a small theater (around 700 seats?) in an English-speaking part of the world. I fought tooth and nail AGAINST having titles when we recently produced TURN OF THE SCREW in a 400-seat theater near Seattle; I was overruled (one of the annoying things that’s contributed, recently, to my crisis of faith). You’re supposed to listen! You’re supposed to have read it already! And YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND EVERY WORD! But no, "We’re lost without our titles," shrieks the American opera audience. "It’d be like going scuba diving with no gear! We’d drown! We’d die a horrible death!" As if simply reading the words–seeing that yes, that text is in fact what that singer is (supposed to be) trying to communicate–is going to help you figure out what the opera really is. I think, with Britten, most of the time titles do not help. He was incredibly literate and well-read, and many of his libretti are complicated poetry, tough and thorny. You don’t have enough time in the opera house, as each title comes up, to puzzle out what it means. Read it ahead of time, study it at your leisure–but don’t worry about it in the theater. Assuming you know the basic gist of the plot, he’s way too canny a dramatist ever to leave you really confused about what’s going on. If he wants certain words understood, he writes them in such a way–no orchestra, voice on a monotone–that you’d have to be deaf not to understand. Are supratitles, like ipods, going to make people deaf?

Forgive my passion. It was just such a pleasure, last night, to sit down and HEAR an opera the way God intended–music and story familiar to me, in the language of the audience, no titles–and gloriously sung. It’s the singers’ job above all, in the absence of titles, to communicate the text by a) really singing the entire word, every last consonant sung through, clearly and beautifully and b) meaning what they sing, so the drama provides another clue to the text. And no one exemplifies this better than last night’s Oberon. As far as I’m concerned, Bejun Mehta can do no wrong. (Of course, I don’t know him very well!) His voice was big, rich, full of color and personality, and yes–he sang through each and every consonant. Hearing him was like a lesson in how to sing in English. Oberons over the years have been a mixed bag; my favorite has always been Brian Asawa, who sings it on the wonderful Colin Davis recording. But Asawa, who has this fantastically cat-like silky smooth seductive quality, does not (to me at least) convey Oberon’s patriarchal authority. This Mehta carried out with aplomb, sounding at times like a tenor, he has so much strength in his voice. Oberon is playing God: trying to do good in the world, to set the four lovers to rights, hindered only by his incompetent or knavish servant. Mehta’s Paterfamilias weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders bearing plumed up an interpretation recently proposed to me by the brilliant Vanessa Miller, who contends that the Oberon-Tytania struggle is not (as Britten’s Freudian analysts would have it) based on Oberon’s being in love with the changeling, but something far more common: the dynamic between mom and dad shifted when baby came along, and really dad wants mom back. He says he wants the kid, but it’s really more about "I still need her to need me, and all she cares about is that kid...so she can't have it!" This was more or less the reading we got last night, brought to us by Mehta, Peter Hall, and the revival director, James Robert Carson; at the end, Oberon and Tytania share a passionate embrace, clearly in love with each other again. And in the brief scene in Act 2 where Oberon punishes Puck there was none of the S&M eroticism you sometimes see. In fact, the whole thing was a very PG MIDSUMMER.

In some ways, it was the single most old-fashioned MIDSUMMER I’ve ever seen. I’ll recommend whole-heartily to any fans of this story the old 1930s film starring Jimmy Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck; filmed in sumptuous German expressionist style by Max Reinhardt, it gets on the screen the old approach to MIDSUMMER: romantic forests, cute fairies, wondrous magic, and lowbrow comedy. And of course Mendelssohn’s immortal music, which so influenced Richard Wagner when he heard it at the first performances that he had to go outdo it in his MEISTERSINGER. This was always the rule in MIDSUMMER productions; the play was done all the time, all over the English-speaking world, often very poorly, with hordes of local children recruited to wear little gossamer wings and play the nauseatingly cute fairies. The whole thing traditionally had about as much real theatrical value as a neighborhood Christmas pageant; you remember Shermy’s line from A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS: "Every Christmas it’s the same. I always wind up playing a sheep."

J.R.R. Tolkien, who knew from fairies and elves, resented MIDSUMMER, particularly this traditional diminutization of the fairies into the cute neighborhood children playing Monsieur Moth, Cavalry Cobweb, et al. To Tolkien, fairies and elves could be a heck of a lot more interesting than that: "Damn Will Shakespeare and his blasted pixies!" he is reputed to have said. But Tolkien was wrong to blame Shakespeare; blame the tradition by all means, which over the years did indeed do that to MIDSUMMER; but blame not Will, who gave his MIDSUMMER fairies a stature and eloquence in his poetry to which could only aspire:

PUCK
Yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night.

OBERON
But we are spirits of another sort:
I with the morning's love have oft made sport,
And, like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.

Something of the magic in that poetry affected the young Benjamin Britten more powerfully than it had Tolkien, when Britten played in the pit (the Mendelssohn) as a schoolboy. (Actually, he didn’t put the lines I just quoted into the opera. But they’re great lines!) When he came to make an opera of MIDSUMMER, 30 years later, without denying the old traditions of MIDSUMMER he wrote a breathtaking score, every note of which carries Britten’s unique sound. All Britten’s great operas are about two worlds in collision: the shore and the sea, or the individual and the community, in PETER GRIMES; the boat and the sea (or good and evil, or Bb major and B minor) in BILLY BUDD; the quick and the dead, in SCREW; the solipsistic singer (blogging his trip to Venice) and the dancer in DEATH IN VENICE. In MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM it’s the clash between the fairy world and the mortal–and Britten differentiates them musically, by giving the fairies such weird voices: a countertenor, a choir full of boys, a chirpy coloratura soprano, a pre-pubescent teenage boy whose voice is cracking and who declaims rather than sings. You can do a traditional-looking MIDSUMMER to Britten’s score–it will come out bizarre and unique because the score is something so rich and strange.

That’s what Peter Hall did, and as I say it’s the first traditional MIDSUMMER I’ve ever seen. Because at the same time that Britten was writing his score, in the 60s, wunderkind director Peter Brook was exploding the old MIDSUMMER tradition by doing the first ever regie-theater MIDSUMMER, set in a big white room, done as something like a circus. And MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM has never been the same since. I’ve seen the play many times, but always in outer space, or the land of Cats, or in an American high school in the 1950s or something. (Now, in some of the movies–the old 30s one, and the most recent one, with Kevin Kline as Bottom and Stanley Tucci as Puck, and I don’t know about all the others–you see more traditional stuff, but never onstage.) Sorry to sound like reactionary-traditionalist-conservative that I am, but I think Peter Hall may have been on to somethng by doing it traditionally, the way he did.

(By the way, this tradition seems to be a mostly 19th century thing, stemming from Schlegel’s German translation and that Devrient/Mendelssohn/Brothers Grimm kind of production, the one Wagner saw. We have little way of knowing what it might have been like when Shakespeare’s group put it on–but I for one am extremely curious what would happen to a huge ‘War of the Sexes’ story like this if you did it with an all-male cast, the way Shakespeare would have done. It’s like TAMING OF THE SHREW, the battle lines are firmly drawn in the first scene: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, and won thy love doing thee injuries."

Who wins this war of the sexes? Weirdly, it’s hard to say; in comedy the girls almost always get what they want, the man they want, and in in the end that certainly happens here, to both Hermia and Helena. The big character transformation that results from the orgy in the forest is that Demetrius changes his affection back to Helena. But what about the other two couples? Does Hippolyta get what she wants? Does Tytania? I’ve never been convinced, and think it’s weird that Shakespeare left that kind of a loose end. On the other hand, the McGuffin that gets their battle going is the changeling, who is then barely mentioned later on, despite the efforts of directors who make it all about him. On the other hand, maybe what Tytania really wanted, or at least needed, was a sweaty night with an ass (she’s always reminded me of Catherine the Great in this). And after she’s pushed back that boundary, as it were, she’s okay with her life as it was before.)

Hall’s production has been continually revived at Glyndebourne since 1981. It’s available on video (I remember showing clips from it years ago in a lecture) and is much beloved by the audience. My pal Stephen came back Thursday night after having seen it here four years ago. It looks something like the Met’s current RING: an Arthur Rackham fairy-book illustration, a fabulous nineteenth-century enchanted forest. The set, designed by John Bury, was marvellously lit by Paul Pyant, who’s one of the great wizards of the industry. It’s a simple enough design–lots of trees, and tree-scrims, which move about between the various scenes, with an entrance at the back and athree horizontal layers of tree-covered wings. And then an open space around a fireplace (complete with real, cheery, 16th-century English-looking fire) for Theseus’s court, the actors performing on a makeshift platform medieval-touring-style, with glass walls at the back–and behind the walls we see the forest, from which we have taken refuge but to which we must return. The fairies make their final entrance through those glass doors to bless the house and the couples. In that amazingly beautiful processional ("Now until the break of day", set by Britten to something called the ‘Scotch Snap’, a Renaissance-era court dance) each time the soprano hits a high note at the beginning of a phrase all the fairies toss a handful of silver glitter up into the air. Cliche? I didn’t think so, because it was just so darn beautiful and so perfect for that music. Other great set/design moments: the appearance of Tytania’s bower, at the top of Act 2, so beautiful it hurt, wreathed in trails of forest mist. And she and Bottom made out on a little mound in the forest which went up and down from the trap–and would you believe it? Bottom had obviously been reading my blog, he pulled up the forest floor to cover himself when he slept, a cozy green rug which looked like moss.

The other great set-bit was Puck’s entrances and exits occasionally on flying tree branches. Puck was 11, the multi-talented local performer Jack Morden, made up in John Bury’s design with lots of scary red hair standing straight up. In fact I never noticed before this production how similar the Oberon-Puck thing is to the Wotan-Loge affair–traditional Loges, you remember, have that same zappy hair. Morden was younger than most Pucks, but had a nice, bright, clear, piping voice which held its own against some amazing singers. He was also a great acrobat, who was exiting with cartwheels when he wasn’t flying away on swinging branches.

The Tytania, Iride Martinez (Costa Rican), was okay, but no match for the incomparable Bejun Mehta. Among the lovers, the only one I didn’t find appealing was Tove Dahlberg (Swedish), the Hermia. Kate Royal played Helena with classically British grace and marvelous wit; she’s a Londoner, tall, skinny, blonde, who will be doing Semele and Miranda in Ades’s TEMPEST at Royal Opera. I also really liked the Lysander, Timothy Robinson, an old favorite at Glyndebourne, who has a nice big voice and who’s also sung Vere and some of the entry-level Wagner tenor stuff. I’d be curious to hear him as Loge.

Matthew Rose all but stole the show as Bottom. A young bass who’s come up through the Royal Opera YAP, he’s now singing on their mainstage and cleaning up down here where the audience was delighted both by his enormous, rich voice and his sense of humor (and acting–Bottom’s Dream was one of the great moments of the evening). In the Pyramus and Thisby play, he was gently outdone by Michael Smallwood, the really wonderful Flute. An Australian with a beautiful light lyric tenor, he pulled off all the ‘sung’ cracking and off-pitch stuff with great wit and charm, and then managed that bizarrely quick about-face from comic to serious and back again in Thisby’s final passion.

I was sorry we didn’t hear more of Iain Patterson (Scottish), the mighty bass (he’s now done Gunther and Fasolt) who made so much of Theseus’s very few lines. (Another highlight of the evening was his impressive "The iron tongue of midnight hath tolled twelve!") The auxiliary comics were all fine (we particularly liked the man in the MOON).

Speaking of comics, one thing about this MIDSUMMER–about any traditional MIDSUMMER, probably, is that it wasn’t especially loaded with laughs. MIDSUMMER can be very pretty, and it can be very funny–but probably not both at the same time. Oh well–I’ve laughed at it before and will do so again. (The musical jokes were funny Thursday night.) It’s interesting to me that everything about that 19th-century romantic illustrative tradition–just like the FACT of singing, and the resultant non-immediacy of the text–works against humor. Thus was SALOME–a very funny French play by Oscar Wilde, whose house I visited on my walking tour of Chelsea the other day–transformed into a very unfunny German opera by Richard Strauss, God save him. (And he had a great sense of humor!) There are those who feel weird about laughing at Shakespeare, and at opera, because they feel it’s somehow supposed to be high, noble, lofty, and un-funny; and of course nothing could be farther from the truth. I believe that for Shakespeare as for Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Britten–all the greatest dramatists–comedy, in the end, gets you closer to the essence of things. It’s certainly harder to do. And we all seem to like it a little more.