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.

Opera and Gardens

We're going to Glyndebourne tonight, and last night, to get in the mood, I took the tube out to Holland Park (pictured right), one stop past Notting Hill, to hear Giordano's opera FEDORA performed out in their temporary venue at Holland Park Opera. The British love gardening and they love opera, and what could be better, in these summer months, than to get both at the same time? Holland Park itself is a lovely suburb, not as well-known as its film-star neighbors, and the vast park is full of this kind of garden, that kind of garden, playing fields, and a small quasi-outdoor opera theater. (Only seats about 500, I'd guess; pavillion-type roof which probably makes a lot of noise in the rain.) But they put on an ambitious program of operas each summer, have been doing so for some ten years, and the quality is quickly on the rise.

That said, it still isn't a company competing on a world scale--the real biggies, around here, are English National Opera (the people's opera, where they sing everything in English, mostly with titles); Royal Opera Covent Garden; and, down south outside Brighton, Glyndebourne. But there are truckloads of other fine opera companies everywhere you go around here, many of them doing very exciting work.

I was glad to get a chance to hear FEDORA, which is one of those operas you always read about but which rarely gets done. (Domingo and Freni made the rounds of the big houses doing it some years back.) It's not hard to see why: the plot, based on Sardou (one of the 'well-made play' guys, he also came up with the plot of TOSCA) is more than usually silly. There are a few interesting situations, bristling with more dramatic irony than all of contemporary American media; but at the end, when Fedora kills herself, I had a really hard time figuring out why, or if I should care. (Jane Eaglen once told me: "I simply can't play those parts where the girl goes, 'Oh, my boyfriend left me, I think I'll sip poison out of my ring and die.' I need to play strong women!" Fedora sucks poison out of her ring, obstensibly because she feels guilty that she's inadvertently caused the death of her boyfriend's mother and brother; but she'd never be guilty in a court, and it felt much more like 'okay, it's about time for this opera to end, so...I know! Let's have the soprano commit suicide. That's never been done before!')

That said, there's some attractive music in this piece. I'm a great fan of Giordano's better-known opera ANDREA CHENIER--a guilty pleasure, to be sure, since it, too, is pretty cheap; but it sure is fun to listen to. FEDORA is the kind of opera that stands or falls by star power--if you have a good pair of lovers, with beautiful voices and strong personalities, you can have a really nice evening in the theater. Our Fedora last night was Yvonne Kenney, an Australian who's had a decent career here in London but is getting to be closer to the end of her career than she is to the beginning. She had the personality, but not especially the voice--her top was full of effort and a little wobbly. She's a tall, grand woman who appeared in several amazing dresses, and had no problem commanding the stage. Easier on the ear was her very young tenor, Aldo di Toro, another Australian (originally from Western Australia, it seemed to me) with a really attractive, Alfredo Kraus-type lyric sound. He sings the popular aria "Amor ti vieta" in the second act, but for me the most exciting scene was the love duet that followed, sung entirely over onstage piano accompaniment (orchestra tacet). In this scene he explains why he killed her former fiance--a Russian nobleman who, unbeknownst to her, was only marrying her for her money, and only days before his wedding to Fedora was carrying on an affair with the tenor's wife. Fedora (who'd been trying to kill the tenor as revenge for murdering her fiance) forgives him and hate very quickly turns into love--as it only can in opera! (Don't know why M. Sardou bothered to write this as a play; it absolutely needs music.)

The audience was packed, a decent assortment of well-dressed Londoners, good age range, same demographic more or less as you would see in any of the big London opera houses. I don't see quite as many school groups here as I did in theaters in Germany. All the kids are going to the museums; I spent a nice afternoon at the Tate Britain the other day, and yesterday took a fabulous walking tour around Chelsea, a suburb on the way toward Holland Park. My tour guide, a former elephant-tender at the zoo (good training for dealing with tourists), had been an extra in the great movie SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.

Theater in London

Just a quick note on some of the fine theater I've seen here in London so far...first, the other night, Peter Shaffer's ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN at the National Theater, a play from 1964 (by the author of Equus and Amadeus, the greatest composer-bio ever) which was also performed there during their first year in the wild neo-brutalist building.

The play itself, which concerns Pizarro and the Incas, is a bit dated, but Trevor Nunn's production was brilliant--operatic, epic, enormous, as befits the subject. Two huge sheets that come rippling out of the cut-out circle in the back wall, one a river of blood as the Spanish are massacring the Incas, another a river of gold as they are melting all the Inca treasures down into gold bricks for transport back to Spain. Alun Armstrong, who I've seen in plenty of films, was Pizarro, tormented by his own post-World War II nihilism; Paterson Joseph stole the show as the Inca king Atahualpa, who believes he is god, the son of the sun, and is really a fabulous character.

Then, last night, Ernesto and Jonathan and I went to Handel's ARIODANTE at the English National Opera (the Coliseum, where I'd never before been, turns out to be right next door to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where I stumbled upon a Ralph Vaughan Williams concert the other day. The very first cd I ever owned, back in 1991, was SM-i-t-F playing VW! What memories! What luck!). Handel's operas are never as easy for me as some, but this was gorgeously sung, particularly by two singers who are flying to Seattle in a couple of weeks: the amazing Alice Coote, who was Ariodante, and the ever-brilliant Peter Rose, who was Ariodante's girlfriend's dad. It's an old ENO production by David Alden, which does as well with Handel's difficult dramaturgy as most Handel productions do. (Now, Rodelinda at the Met...that's a different story!)

A couple more London adventures (I went on a great bicycle tour of the city all day yesterday) and then it's back to the States! My computer is having terrible problems, so don't get your hopes up that you'll ever see any of the missing pictures.

I love London!

It's the most exciting city in the world...a city which is a pretty good picture of our crazy world, today. Actually, today is a really sweaty heat wave in London. I got here about 24 hours ago, and it's kind of nice to be more or less done with the whole "following in Richard's footsteps" part of the trip--back to normal old life again, which is weird enough.

I'm sorry I'm still not getting any pictures up on here...I've got plenty, but I'm afraid I reached my maximum limit on memory back in Neuschwanstein. I may shortly be opening Blog Part Two, to find more space (and post smaller pictures, having learned my lesson).

Anyways, the fun adventure to report was the insane transit out of Wagner's city of love and death: I walked (with my outrageously heavy bags and fragile Murano glass gifts and all) from the inn to the vaporetto stop, took the unnecessarily slow vaporetto up the Grand Canal to the train station, ran through the train station (bruising anyone who got in the way with my outrageously heavy bags) to leap onto the train just as it was pulling out, rode to Verona, wandered around the outside of the train station (with outrageously heavy bags) until I found the proper bus stop, took a bus to the Verona airport (Verona, the Romeo and Juliet town, a lovely city I visited years ago), took a shuttle bus within the airport, took a flight to Gatwick--only 2 hours, shortest flight I've been on in years--then waited an absurdly long time in Gatwick to reclaim my outrageously heavy bag with all the fragile glass, took a shuttle train within Gatwick to its real train station, again made a mad dash for a train which I boarded with one minute to spare, to come up to London. I mean, I'm a big fan of mass transit and all...but I was really happy when my friend Andy showed up at Victoria station to pick me up IN HIS CAR. 'Cause this was getting kind of ridiculous. And frankly, the Tube today, with the heat wave and all, was no better.

Andy's hospitality has indeed been glorious, and I had a terrific (though sweaty) first day in London--including a completely random encounter with Ernesto and Jonathan, in St. James's Park this afternoon about 4 pm, not far from Buckingham Palace. (If you're looking for Ernesto, just go wherever there's royalty and he's bound to turn up.) I knew they were in London, but we hadn't figured out how we were going to meet. But this always happens to me in London--it happened with Bryan Lyson, it happened with Cyrus Hamlin, with Andy and with Gary, and now with these guys. I love this town!

A Previously Unpublished Chapter of Wagner’s Autobiography, Recently Discovered by Yours Truly

I’m Richard Wagner! I’m the greatest writer and composer who ever lived! And I speak to you now, from beyond the grave, my voice brought to you through the magic of blogging, to tell you about some of my experiences in the city of Venice, or as we call it auf Deutsch, VENEDIG. (The natives call it ‘Venezia’. Ah, the glories of Babel! And what a city for it! So many tourists, from so many places, most Venetians need to be able to buy and sell in English, French, Spanish, and German as well. And Venetian is a far cry from Italian!)

I remember so well time spent in Venice back in the summer of 1858. I had been staying near Zurich, with my great friends the Wesendoncks, until...well, things there went a bit south. I was supposed to be hard at work writing my great ‘RING’ cycle; but two powerful forces had joined strength to push me from that difficult path, first one of my rare moments of practical lucidity, in which I despaired that I could either finish the RING or manage to get it produced; and secondly, the considerable charms of Frau Wesendonck. It was with she as muse that I turned from writing, in the RING, the sum total of our time and our world, and turned instead to building a monument to love in all its glory—that blissful love which I in my misery have never been fortunate enough to know. TRISTAN AND ISOLDE—a poem of love in its purest passion, that sexual love from which all other loves must derive. My impossible love for Mathilde inspired this impossible work, which they later considered ‘unperformable’ and ‘unplayable’ in Vienna.

Mathilde knew about it; she fed it, nourished it, pushed me onwards; but she insisted upon misunderstanding me, when I spoke to her about the proper relations between the sexes, and thus we had that argument about Gretchen in Goethe’s FAUST. And I scribbled that regrettable response for her to read the next morning; and alas! my wife intercepted it, as should never have been. In the unpleasant altercations that necessarily followed, they all continued their refusal to understand me; and thus my flight to Venice, accompanied only by young Karl Ritter. A sweet knave, and devoted to me; but it was clear from the beginning that he would never amount to much, so thank goodness his mother was wealthy. (And shared his taste in music!)

We stayed in rooms at the Palazzo Giustinian in Venice, on the Grand Canal. I had no wife, no hope of any great love; no homeland, no money, no friends; only a useless catamite for company, and now I was working on my fourth unperformable, unfinishable drama (with a further three foreseen from afar). It’s a wonder I went on breathing.

Our rooms were lovely, giving on to the Grand Canal, but the incessant noise of those gondolieri! They call Venice ‘La Serenissima’, the Most Serene Republic, and indeed parts of it are more quiet than any place I know—no cry of birds, no sound of wind, no human voices, only the ebb and flow of water in the small canals, and sometimes the quiet lapping against stone steps. But the Grand Canal—that’s a different kind of song. There the gondoliers are forever passing back and forth, and ever singing that strange local music of the gondolieri, something like the mournful cry of a tall bird standing in a swamp, one foot firmly fixed fast in the muck, thus rendering its wings useless.

Little wonder, then, that this sound found its way into my TRISTAN; as the third act begins, and the hero lies wounded, abandoned, desparate, friendless, penniless, in faraway Kareol, he hears in the shepherd’s piping on the hill, in the English horn solo, an echo of the ‘alte Weise’—his song of love and death. MY song of love and death. The sound of Venice.

It is the loveliest place there is, truly. Everyone who comes here feels the pull of love; the perfect place for a romantic getaway: the land of Casanova, of carnival, of quiet, slow journeys up and down the canals, with a pretty young thing in the back of the boat with you. Goethe knew it, wrote about it in his salacious ‘Venetian epigrams.’ You see it, everywhere, the ubiquitous public displays of affection; you smell it in the perfumed air of the lagoon, you know it from the hazy light rippling off the water. To be in Venice is to be in love.

But it is also the land of death. Elsewhere one is never so conscious of our proximity to the other side. On land, back home in Saxony and Bavaria, there is life everywhere you turn: the air is full of birds, the land is covered in vegetation, the fields and forests are filled with beasts, the waters are full of fish. But in Venice (in the city itself, not the outer lagoon) the water is only death. It’s always there, never obtrusive, patiently waiting; it touches everything, connects everything, it is the ethereal which surrounds and embraces and protects and ultimately receives us. The city itself is no city but a great vessel; it emerged from the sea and to the sea will it one day return, as this our life is rounded with a sleep.

Our lives come closest to death in love. Through love do we create new life, balanced in the end with our own death; in the act of love we momentarily forget this life, to reconnect with that infinite from which we came and to which we must return. Thus love, like the canals of Venice, connects us all through the ages in this great floating city of humanity. Thus it is to Venice that I came to write my song of love and death.

It became a fearsome thing; I knew as I created it that only inadequate performances could save us, that really good ones would drive men mad. The first to go was my good, poor Schnorr, my Tristan in Munich, the only one capable of really SINGING my difficult drama. (His wife could sing it, too...but she, too, went mad. He died too soon, leaving Malvina alive to torture me for decades.)

For myself, I found a way out of the endless spiral of that English Horn solo, that ‘alte Weise’ of love and death—music, they later said, which began the destruction of tonality—when I happened with Ritter one day to step into the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, in San Polo. An amazing church, really, one of the finest in all Venice, and there are many to choose from! I noticed, as I entered from the left transept, a chapel with a grave and monument to Claudio Monteverdi, one of the earliest composers to work in this form of ‘opera’—long before it degenerated into ‘opera’ the way it is generally practiced today. I didn’t know these operas by Monteverdi while I lived, but had I known them I would have approved, because he wrote dramas, not operas. Passing a little farther into the church, I happened upon a grave and memorial to Francesco Foscari, the early Doge of this city who died of grief upon the death of his exiled son Jacopo. This history was well known, in my day, because Lord Byron (who stayed here in Venice across the Grand Canal from my Giustinian) immortalized him in a poem, “The Two Foscari”, which an Italian contemporary of mine—the one born the same year as me, and who did such strange things to Shakespeare—turned into one of the dreariest ‘operas’ in the tradition which degenerated out of Monteverdi’s really strong start, his I due Foscari. The less said about that, the better.

But it was the painting above the central altar—Titian’s ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN—which hit me like a thunderbolt. I saw the painting; tears flooded my eyes, I felt my heart racing, I gasped for breath. I grabbed Karl’s arm—“There! That’s it!” I shouted. “That’s the face of my Isolde, in her final transfiguration!” As she soars upwards, assumed heavenwards, into the highest rapture of ecstasy, the gold pouring down from the heavenly Father. Perhaps Titian’s noblest work, and certainly the one which took me from the English Horn solo at the top of Act Three to the long-sought resolution at the end of Act Three. And I knew, when I gazed upon Titian’s vast, intricate, busy yet carefully balanced canvas, how I would write my MASTERSINGERS OF NÜRNBERG. A comedy, yes, a spoof on the singing competition of TANNHÄUSER, and on the Forging Song of SIEGFRIED; but a comedy with a great heart, a celebration of all that is divine in the spirit of man. And so, with TRISTAN finished, it was back to Switzerland to work on MEISTERSINGER (mostly in our charming house in Tribschen).

But it was not farewell to Venice. My final farewell to Venice, as it happened, was my final farewell to this earth. A fitting end, I think. It was February of 1883; we had been spending more and more time in Italy, since the 1876 opening of the Festival, first in search of scenic inspiration for my final, consecratory, drama, the grail-story of PARSIFAL; but after that simply because it’s warmer in the land of the sun, and I felt my tired old body deserved a little heat and light after so many northern years of rain and cold. We were staying at the time in Palazzo Vendramin, now the grand casino of Venice, near where the newfangled ‘train’ deposits its passengers.

All I remember is, it was a rainy, nasty, cold, wet February, and Cosima and I had been having another one of our rows; in this case it was because of the visit, the day before, of the young English singer Carrie Pringle, one of my lovely Blumenmädchen from the summer before, the first performances of PARSIFAL the long-awaited grail opera. Of course Fräulein Pringle was young and delightful, am I to blame for that? She and I had gone over some of the Rheintöchter music from the RING, their final cry of “Truth and trust can be found only in the deeps; False and cowardly is all that reigns on high!” The last music I heard, still ringing in my ears even now. Nothing I ever wrote was more true or more beautiful...and so early on! Strange, how I knew it, even then.

But since I did grow passionate, Cosima assumed there was more to our tête-à-tête than might be proper, and I had to explain calmly that no harm was meant or done, and that she should go easy on an old man. The next morning I was sitting down to continue work on my essay, “On the Feminine in the Human,” in which I intended to prove, finally to prove, that women might also be considered human beings; and it was then that my old trouble began again. I knew it at once, and called for the servant; he called Cosima, and she came, and in my Isolde’s all-forgiving, all-knowing, all-consuming embrace this Tristan’s light was put out for good. But whether the sound of the ‘alte Weise’ continued or no, I am not here to tell you.

I will tell you, I’m not so keen on some of what’s happened since I’ve been away. This German writer, young Thomas Mann, has memorialized me in his DEATH IN VENICE, as a ridiculous old fop lusting after a Polish youth, choosing to die of cholera rather than risk separation from one with whom he was never and could never be united. A lot of claptrap, I say...I was never on the Lido, where Mann’s story is set, I never felt the slightest twinge of lust for such youths—despite my admiration for Goethe, here is one place I was never able to follow him—and I never traveled alone, as Mann’s ‘Aschenbach’ does in his old age; I always pull after me an entourage of at least ten useless people, many of whom—Ritter, Joukowsky, even that sad king, who once threatened to abdicate his throne and come to Tribschen to live with Cosima and I—did more than enough lusting after the ragazzi. How do they find me?

Some young fool, I notice, has been seeking me recently, turning up in all sorts of places where they remember me. I wonder—will he find me, too?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: that young fool took all sorts of pictures, but for some reason I'm having trouble getting them uploaded. Sorry...technical difficulties...hopefully we'll be able to edit them in...)

Munich and Luzern

I’m writing this blog this evening down here in fabulous Venice-—“Ah, Venice...” you’re supposed to moan—-where a couple important chapters of Wagner’s life take place, unlike the Ludwig castles. I’m gonna have to skip the pictures (plus the leftover pictures I didn’t post from the other day) because this internet connection is, as we say in London, "a bit dodgy". But I can give you the scoop on my discoveries in two fine Wagner cities.

MUNICH
Wagner himself only lived in Munich for a little bit, maybe a year and a half. When Ludwig II became king of Bavaria, in 1864, he immediately summoned Wagner to be his Court Composer (even though Wagner was technically still in exile because of his participation in the Dresden uprising back in 1849). Wagner immediately moved to Munich and began living in outrageously sumptuous style, pissing all all the Müncheners because a) he was obviously spending all the king’s money on his personal luxuries, b) he went around telling everyone he was the king’s tutor and principal advisor, and that the king would do anything Wagner said and c) he was also obviously having an affair with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, a married woman (whose husband was Wagner’s right-hand man). And don’t forget d) he was often a complete and total asshole. So by 1866, they ganged up on him and asked the king to get him to leave town.

Now, it’s a really lovely town! I’d heard lots of nice things about Munich and was happy to find out they were all true. Like Berlin, it’s a great world city; but it doesn’t give me that slightly odd, askew feeling I noticed in Berlin (even though Munich, too, was bombed to pieces during the war). Many people refer to Munich as 'a great big village’, and I understand why; it’s easy to feel really safe there, apparently there’s no crime at all, just lots of fun-loving beer-drinking Bavarians and, this week, soccer fans (they call it ‘Fußball’ here). There are zillions of orchestras and two big opera houses: I was staying half a block from the smaller of the two opera houses, Theater am Gärtnerplatz, where my old friend Frances Lucey (known to Seattle opera fans as Rosalba, in Florencia, Despina, and in a few weeks Sophie van Faninal) is in the ensemble. (Meaning she’s one of about 20 resident singers, performing a handful of roles in the 10 or so operas they do in rep each year.) I heard her sing a charming Papagena (in an otherwise stupid production of Magic Flute) and Berta in a Rossini Barbiere set in the land of insects. (Don't ask...just come back when I get the pictures up!)

My three favorite things about Munich were the opera houses (including Frances’s theater, where they sing everything in German and do a lot of lighter stuff, including American musicals), the eastern-looking onion domes on the tops of church steeples (a Bavarian obsession, I understand) and the incredible Victualienmarkt—a vast open-air market, à la Pike’s Market, with lots and lots of yummy and weird things all prepared and ready to go. I had some charming Bavarian beer and even tried the local favorite Weisswurst, a sausage made from (ugh) veal. But when in Rome...live like a Roman, and it'll turn out they know what they're doing!

LUZERN
When Wagner was forced out of Munich, he moved to Tribschen, a nice house in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Lucerne, right outside the town of Luzern. It was here he wrote much of Meistersinger and Siegfried (his two comedies), became great friends with Nietzsche, and spent probably the happiest period in his life. I followed in his footsteps and went down to Luzern from Munich (it’s about a 5 hour train ride, mostly through the Alps). The real reason I went was to see the Richard Wagner Museum now housed in Tribschen; but frankly, after Bayreuth and Villa Wahnfried there’s not much point in going to any other Wagner museums. Luckily for me, there turned out to be plenty more in Luzern itself.

The thing about Wagner museums is, they’re not necessarily very well-funded, or for that matter professional. I’m fond of Ballard’s Nordic Heritage Museum; but if you’re coming from EMP, or even the Seattle Art Museum, there’s something that’s charmingly naive about these places, and the Wagner museums are no different. They remind me of the Catholic churches famed for having relics of saints—-St. Bartholomew’s fingernail, part of Lazarus’s chest, etc. “Here’s a letter Richard Wagner wrote his landlord!” “Here’s a reproduction of a photo of Richard Wagner you’ve already seen 10,000 times!” “Here’s one of Wagner’s silly berets!” But then again, what would you expect to find in a museum devoted to one person?

When I got to Luzern, I took the bus down to Tribschen-—it was a hot day, and we passed by a school where a bunch of 12 year-olds were tossing javelins—-and checked out the museum, where the coolest things were a late-19th century painting of the Red and White Lion Inn in the Leipzig Brühl, where Wagner was born (which is now a department store, see last week’s blog), a bust of Mathilde Wesendonck, a bust of Wagner’s hand, which is only a little smaller than mine-—he was a very short man, but had comparatively big hands—-and a Tristan und Isolde altarpiece. Not kidding, it’s one of those fold-out triptych things in the shape of a heart; when the covers are closed, on the outside you see T+I glaring at each other, as at the start of Act One Scene Three; open it up, and inside they’re naked, doing it, and reaching up toward a large figure of some kind (I suppose it’s supposed to be the goddess of Night)—-with, on the left panel, Tristan in Kareol yearning for the right panel, which is Isolde coming to him on waves full of flowers. Oh my God. Never seen anything so ridiculous in all my years.

I walked back up to the main part of town, which hugs the shores of the river feeding into Lake Lucerne. (What was the ‘outskirts of town’ in Wagner’s day is really about 20 minutes walk from the center of things.) Since it was a totally gorgeous day, I signed up for a boat ride that evening: the ferry out into the Vierstättenwaldsee (known to us as Lake Lucerne?) with dinner served, a two-hour sunset cruise. Just amazing. I mean, I knew Switzerland was supposed to be pretty; but this was outrageous! (You really should be looking at some of the pictures right now.) Cross a boat ride through the San Juan Islands with a drive through the Cascades and Olympics, with the mountains coming straight down to water’s edge, and cute little villages everywhere you look, and you’ll get some sense of this alarmingly beautiful corner of the world. I met some very nice Swiss people on the boat, a young couple who came from an hour away just to enjoy this sunset cruise and who didn’t mind playing tour guide to an idiot American. One thing that alarmed and embarrassed me: Swiss German is not German German. After all that time in Germany, I was getting the flow of things again with the language. I even caught myself giving an impromptu lecture to some college kids in German the other day. But I couldn’t understand a word anyone in Switzerland was saying, and I got the sense that they’d rather speak English than Hochdeutsch. Also, they don’t use euros (why didn’t anybody tell me about that?) and their electric sockets are not the same as those in Germany or Denmark. Sigh. What you need to know, to be prepared for, when traveling...