WagnerQuest 06

The Safety of Objects

2006-07-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

Home at last! And so WagnerQuest 06 reaches its end, as indeed all things must. As a final blog fling, I thought it would be fun to go through my prop list: which items were of most value to me on this expedition, the ones that left Seattle with me two months ago and never made it back, and the ones that I picked up along the way. Late last night, unpacking after yet another long and laborious trek-ordeal (drive six hours, Mackinaw to Detroit; fly two hours to Denver and three to Seattle, shock of “Hey! I remember this place!” and running into everbody in the community on a gorgeous Seattle summer night), the items I dealt with included:

DESTROYED. My Dell Latitude LAPTOP, over three years old now, the system board departed this world one morning when I was in London (I’m told we’ll be able to retrieve the data, including all those pictures that never made it to the blog). My much-loved Tumi 2 BACKPACK, which has accompanied me for many years over much of this world; the zippers are hopeless, the fabric is torn in many places, and all the ergonomic stuffing is falling out. My L. L. Bean GARMENT BAG of many years and many trips, which exploded on a train in Switzerland—I learned too late that it was never intended to function as a bookbag as well as suitcase as well as garment bag. My GOGGLES ripped a couple days ago; easy come, easy go. And my 4 Megapixel Canon DIGITAL CAMERA went for a swim in Lake Michigan a few weeks ago as someone was trying to take a sunset photo of me swimming for this very blog.

My CELL PHONE is the only electronic device that survived the trip, although it’s been acting very strange since I got home; perhaps it committed suicide, in order to join its friends the camera and computer.

CAME HOME SAFE. KEYS, WALLET, CREDIT and DEBIT CARDS, PASSPORT, CHECKBOOK, and big bag full of world electronic ADAPTORS. Like an idiot I left my 3-to 2 prong American power adaptor here in Seattle, after carefully re-wiring everything in my apartment so I could take it along; I bought a new one in Denmark which allowed me several good weeks of recharged computer/camera/phone batteries. My CLOTHES all made it back, although it was odd to pack for two different trips: in northern Michigan I basically only wore a SWIMSUIT all day every day, and thus didn’t need my opera-going SUITS or the HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT I picked up in London.

NEW ACQUISITIONS. In addition to said HIP BOLLYWOOD SHIRT, I picked up a souvenir DRINKING HORN at Roskilde’s Viking Ship Museum, which my nephew kept using to drink his lemonade; the beautiful season PROGRAM BOOK for the Glyndebourne festival; a Reclam copy of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s GOLDNE TOPF auf Deutsch, a lovely little Italian book with pictures of CARNEVALE IN VENEZIA, all about commedia dell’arte; and a really beautiful art monograph by Kristian Davies, THE ORIENTALISTS, featuring lively prose and incredible reproductions of the great nineteenth-century European academic painters who were obsessed with ‘Oriental’ subjects (camel caravans, mideast landscapes, harems, baths, slave markets, etc.). I also picked up and distributed at various points along the way a gift or two, including such items as a jug of MEAD, a Venetian CARNIVAL MASK, and lots of Mackinaw FUDGE.

The really unexpected item I bring home is a gift my sister-in-law gave me a few days ago, a Burt’s Bees “5 STEPS TO SOFTER FEET" PACKAGE with a pumice stone, coconut foot cream that’s slicker than 10W-40, and little black socks with bees on them. The fact of the matter is, my feet ended up in pretty bad shape, after perhaps too much walking around Europe and probably too long barefoot in the lake and the sun in northern Michigan. Megan’s maternal instincts kicked in when she noticed that my feet were fast turning into dragon claws, and I was surprised to find that the Burt’s Bees treatment, so far, is working pretty well.

THE LIBRARY. The stuff that either accompanied me across Europe or got mailed ahead of time to northern Michigan: BOOKS on Wagner (his autobiography, Millington’s Wagner Compendium, Spencer’s Wagner Remembered, and biographies by Sabor and Gutman; Wagner’s source texts for the Ring (the Elder Edda, in the Auden and Terry translations, the Younger Edda, the Volsunga and Thidreks Sagas, and the Nibelungenlied; and don’t forget, if you’re looking at this material, the great books Kingdom on the Rhine by Nancy Benvenga and Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs by Elizabeth Magee); several books on screenwriting, the most useful of which I found to be McKee’s Story; To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemmingway; Hollywood, by Gore Vidal; Collected Stories by David Leavitt; Erotic Poetry by Goethe (facing-page edition with translations by David Luke); and Struggle for a Vast Future (my brother Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new book on the American Civil War, which I finished while ‘Up North’). In terms of travel guidebooks, I profited from publications by Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Time Out, Discovery Channel, and Teach Yourself Danish, although I have a habit of lightening my load by leaving each book in the relevant country. CDs included Midsummer Night’s Dream music by Mendelssohn and Britten; the deluxe 3-disc edition of Howard Shore’s Fellowship of the Ring music; the gorgeous Silk Road Ensemble discs recently pushed through by Yo-Yo Ma; a disc by Nickel Creek, and another by Air; the soundtrack to Amélie and Peter Gabriel’s Passion; masses by Ockeghem and motets by Machaut; Britten’s Phaedre and Billy Budd; and an historic recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams conducting his Wasps overture and Old King Cole ballet, as well as an abridged 1924 recording of his great opera Hugh the Drover. And of course, there were lots of Wagner discs. DVDs that came on this trip included the Palmer Wagner movie; Palmer’s film of Britten’s Death in Venice; several Shakespeare movies (including Olivier’s Hamlet, Al Pacino as Shylock in Merchant of Venice, and Kevin Kline as Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream); The Vikings; The Big Lebowski; The Thin Red Line; The Blues Brothers; Millions; some Harry Potter and Indiana Jones; and (special favorite of my niece and nephew) the Powell/Pressburger film of Tales of Hoffmann.

The trip itself is finite, but these entertaining and reassuring objects exist without end. So which is more alive? Or have I forgotten the most important ‘object’ on this search, the holy grail at the end of this WagnerQuest—the huge pile of index cards with notes, the two full spiral notebooks, and the 40-page emails with outlines, treatments, and synopses of the screenplay to MONSTER GOD?

SUMMER’S END

2006-07-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

Some friends have joined us here at the cottage, employees of the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy, and I read their copy of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a recent book by Richard Louv, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune. A fascinating issue, particularly relevant to me here in this close-to-nature setting, surrounded by small kids, my brain still steeped in the art and life of Richard Wagner–an artist whose art and life are so closely bound in with his experience of nature. Wagner was the kind of Romantic who saw, ahead of time, where the Industrial revolution would lead; he yearned for primeval German forests, twice cast the ‘Wild Child’ in leading roles in his operas (Siegfried and Parsifal), promoted goofily inaccurate, romanticized pictures of pagan and medieval European society, and spent most of his creative life as far from urban centers as possible because he understood that when man isolates himself from the natural world, horror ensues. To me, Loge is Wagner’s most potent image of the modern age, our post-enlightenment world of science, technology, industry, profit, and insatiable dissatisfaction. And it is Loge who wipes out the human world, at the end of Gotterdammerung. So far as anyone can tell, he’s about to wipe out ours.

Louv’s point is that kids’ experience with nature—whether that be going with parents on trips to national parks or building a tree house in the backyard—has an inverse relationship with such common and terrible modern childhood issues as obesity and ADHD; ie statistically speaking, kids who have more contact with nature are healthier, happier, better students, and less obnoxious than those who spend their entire existences glued to a computer or video-game screen, trapped in the back seat of a car, or (the new fad) both at once. It’s man vs. machine, it’s The Matrix, Terminator, and the future of the human race is at stake. Louv, with his journalist’s background, is perhaps more of a cheerleader than I might be, writing on such a dire issue; his concluding chapters are an explosion of different things different people have been trying or suggesting to help the situation, without (I feel) anything definitive—perhaps because he avoids down-‘n’-dirty grappling with the roots of the problem.

With my own brain shaped by Wagner, I’d probably prefer an ambivalent conclusion. All of Wagner’s conclusions, at the end of all his operas, are ambivalent. Gotterdammerung is both dusk and dawn. (Go through all the others yourself and find other examples!) The issue, as clearly as I’ve found it stated, boils down to this (Louv quoting Seth Norman, a writer on fly-fishing):

"Grasping the Grand Scheme is demanding for adults; for kids raised on Disney, it’s simply shocking to discover that it takes a bunch of Bambis to feed a Lion King, and that Mowgli’s wolves would eat Thumper and all his sibs. Eventually, most of us figure out that it’s people, not nature, who create morality, values, ethics—and even the idea that nature itself is something worth preserving. We choose to be shepherds and stewards or we don’t. We will live wisely—preserving water and air and everything else intrinsic to the equations we’re only beginning to understand, or we won’t, in which case Nature will fill the vacuum we leave. She is exquisite, and utterly indifferent."

I believe it’s easier for one person to make a good decision than for a large group of people to make a good decision; that most of us, decision by decision, do whatever is easiest or requires the least amount of effort; that the great explorers—those who push back the boundaries, those who spend a lifetime in nature, far from their homeland or their native culture—are invariably pushed on by some powerful inner dissatisfaction, something that makes a comfortable life in a little hobbit hole out of the question for them; that the reason the Loge-
computer/video screen is more engaging than the great outdoors is, the computer doesn’t seem to share that complete indifference of Erda-nature but keeps reacting to each of our actions, thereby affirming our existence (ie when you go and hunt and kill an animal, or tear down a forest to build a shopping mall, you can proudly look at it and say: "Look what I did!", whereas the low-impact hiker who merely jots down the numbers of finches he saw in a journal may end up needing some more dramatic way of proving to himself that he was really there). All of which leads me to think Norman’s second version of events is the likely future, that we will destroy ourselves in short order, many beautiful things will be no more, and the Rhine will once again cover it all, roll back, and all will be as if nothing had been.

And yet I know Louv is right, and that there is always still hope. My own spirituality, if I can talk or write about something so intangible, is entirely bound up with childhood experiences of nature and music. I’m still doing it, decades later, with these last two months spent running around listening to operas and then hanging out in the wilderness. Comparing notes with my environmental sector friends, I’m pleased and terrified to see that the same issues are at play in their industry as in ours. It’s well-known that natural sciences education and arts education make kids smarter, healthier, and happier; but these subjects are hard to test, in any quantitative, standardized form, our current obsession, and because there’s no profit to be made in either industry, we always seem to be fighting a losing battle. Yet we know that kids are wide open to both subjects. This last week here has confirmed what our experience of Theft of the Gold suggested, that kids adore Wagner’s musical stories about the wild forces of nature. My 7 year-old nephew has spent the last week studying the libretto to Siegfried; his favorite scene is of course the sword-fight with the dragon. But it does require a little one-on-one contact, a kid modeling an adult who honestly cares about art, or nature, to pry the kid away from the ubiquitous glowing screen. If WE decide that we care—if WE turn off our screens, and work at building great connections with our world (better forms of transportation, better ways of connecting to our food, better ways of enjoying our surroundings and each other, better art, better ways of communicating) then THEY will learn from us that that’s what human beings do.

Kids Show the Way

2006-07-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

My cute little niece, Annie, and nephew, Liam have joined me here at the cottage, along with their parents, and for the last few days their three cousins from Chicago, Rory, Erin, and Malachy (and their parents), have also been visiting. (We can comfortably sleep twelve; more, if people don't mind cushions on the floor.) Unfortunately, my lovely camera recently decided to go for a swim in Lake Michigan, so even if this blog were disposed to upload pictures, I'm afraid I don't have any photos of the assembled crew. They're all very cute. And of course I was pleased when Liam pulled out his Lego set and built a Lego Fafner---don't ask---and Malachy (who's very interested in dragons, and history, and everything) demanded the story of Fafner and Siegfried and the rest. And then Erin, riffing on Rory's portable keyboard, started playing the "Hobbit" theme from Howard Shore's great Lord of the Rings score, displaying terrific musical for such a little girl, and we listened to some Fafner music from Siegfried and to some old books-on-tape discs I made years ago of The Hobbit and so forth. Get 'em young, is my motto!

I've got to run (on babysitting duty tonight, while the kids' parents are off at a Michael Moore function of some kind here in northern Michigan). Tomorrow, more guests arrive! Not much screenplay work is getting done...so it's now the vacation after the vacation after the vacation.

Needed: Casting Director

2006-07-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

Writers find inspiration in weird places; many writers of drama like to know who will be acting or singing the pieces they're writing, so that the performer can inspire the role. I thought I'd jot down here the principal roles from the immense cast list of the proposed MONSTER GOD Wagner film, and see if anybody reading this blog has strong feelings about who to cast in which role. (I've been objecting to Richard Burton as Wagner, whereas Stephen Wadsworth has been praising Trevor Howard's performance as Wagner in the LUDWIG II movie to the skies.)

So who would you cast as:

RICHARD WAGNER

HIS WOMEN:
Minna (his beautiful, unhappy first wife)
Mathilde Wesendonck (his inspiration for Walkure and Tristan, the beautiful wife of his patron)
Cosima (his second wife, must transform from ugly duckling teenager to fearsome high priestess)
Johanna Geyer (Wagner's short, sarcastic mother)
Cacilie Avenarius (his pretty little sister, always full of hatred for Minna)
Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient (the mezzo soprano who turned him on to opera, who created the roles of Senta and Venus)
Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld (his first Isolde, later a raving banshee and thorn in his side)

HIS ENEMIES:
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Holtei (the slimeball theater/brothel manager in Riga)
Luttichau (the obstructionist bureacrat theater manager in Dresden)

HIS FRIENDS:
August Rockel (the bespectacled assistant music director/revolutionary)
Franz Liszt
Mikhail Bakunin (the hairy, bearlike Russian anarchist)
Theodor Uhlig (the A&F-model violinist and 'water cure' enthusiast who dies so young)
Karl Ritter (Wagner's likeable young sidekick who gradually finds himself and leaves Wagner)
Hans von Bulow (Wagner's talented amanuensis and champion who sacrifices his own family to Wagner)
Otto Wesendonck (Wagner's pliable patron and Mathilde's whipped husband)
Peter Cornelius (the talented young composer who gets out from under Wagner while he still can)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ludwig II

HIS DOGS
Rauber, Peps, Fips, and Pohl

And then, what film actors would you cast (lip synching or just acting) in the filmed sequences from Wagner's operas? We'll need a Dutchman, a Senta, a Tannhauser, Venus, Elisabeth, an Alberich and three Rhinedaughters, Wotan, Brunnhilde, Siegfried, Mime, Loge, a Hans Sachs, Beckmesser, Walther, Eva, David, and a Gurnemanz. Or: should we have recognizable characters from Wagner's life starring in his theater-of-the-imagination opera fantasies (ie he himself plays the Dutchman, Tannhauser, Alberich, Wotan, Sachs, Gurnemanz, and so forth...)?

Not just Richard and I anymore

2006-07-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

A photo, a few days old, of a Trailsend Bay sunset. Right now (Saturday afternoon) the wind has picked up, it rained but the sun came out, and we're all about to hit the water.

My orgy of Wagner reading/writing/Mime-esque brooding has been interrupted by a first wave of visitors, including my mom, my aunt, and some close family friends. They all arrived last night, just in time to rescue me from Wagner-induced madness, and we had a great jalapeno chicken salad and some aptly named "Oberon Ale" from southern Michigan. Tonight, on the new grill, we're planning to indulge in some mouth-wateringly nice-looking Lake Huron trout.

I've plowed through a small pile of Wagner books, including a careful rereading of his wacky autobiography. The autobiography is entertaining, full of insane adventures and weird characters; but it's also a tissue of lies! He dictated it to his second wife, for the sake of his weird teenage patron, so all of the stories are told from a bizarre self-edited point of view to try to make him look good in their eyes, and half the fun of reading it is to try to triangulate and figure out, story by story, what REALLY happened. (There are various biographies available, and each of them takes a different stance on the big question: Just how despicably horrible a person was he?)

I've also been grudingly watching the Tony Palmer Richard Burton thing again, which is available on dvd; the only thing I'm happy about is that, scene by scene through this entire 9-hour long film, I keep thinking: "Now, why on earth would anyone tell that story THAT way? I'd have done it THIS way!" So I'm confident I'm not talking about a remake. I object to Burton's characterization of Wagner: Burton is arrogant and obnoxious but doesn't have an ounce of charm, which Wagner obviously had and to spare. The film fails to capture what I find most valuable about Wagner, which is that he was a captivating storyteller, an amazing composer, and an artist of the most extreme visionary genius. I object to their use of music, which seems cheap, and to the dialogue track (the ADR is cheap and the use of accents inconsistent). And the writing...well, I'll stop crabbing about that film and try to propose a good one myself!

Below, one step (earlier this week) towards that goal: the carpet here is covered with little index cards, each of which outlines a potential scene for my film (working title MONSTER GOD). I understand completely why Tony Palmer's film was 9 hours; I drafted over a hundred scenes---and that's just about the creation of the RING, skipping much of Wagner's life! So the real creative work will be slimming it down to a story that can fit in one evening. I pitched an outline this morning, to the assembled guests here, and I think it can be done...it can be done. It will be expensive, but not impossible.

Bridge and Story Spine

2006-06-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

On a cloudy day last week I got a photo or two on a bike ride into Mackinaw city, which mysteriously loaded today. (The others didn't; and these haven't until now. What motivates a blog's inner workings?) The important thing about Mackinaw City is of course the Mackinaw Bridge, linking Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas. This photo looks east at the bridge; I’m standing, with my bike, in Lake Michigan, and on the other side the water mysteriously becomes Lake Huron.

I find it remarkable, after traveling in places like Copenhagen and Istanbul, and living in Seattle, to come back here to where I spent my childhood and see how comparatively UNdeveloped this place is, given that it shares with those other locations an incredibly strategic spot on major waterways. On the other hand, the straits here literally freeze over every winter, so that you can drive a car out onto the ice (maybe they don’t really need the bridge, that time of year!), which I don’t think happens in those places. But even more, the issue is the historical period of development; Istanbul developed way, way, way back when, Copenhagen a little more recently, but still it was the age of sail. The best possible way anybody could get anything anyplace, in those days, was by boat. In Mackinaw, the history is quite different; the settlement here started in the mid-1700s, with the Jesuit Father Marquette (and his sidekick Joliet) stopping up here, founding the little town of St. Ignace on the other side of the bridge, and blessing Fort Michilimackinac (nowadays a tourist trap), which played a role in the French and Indian War. But by the time there were enough people living up in this part of the world for the straits to become strategically important, cars had taken the place of trains, and sailing was a rich man’s hobby. In the 1950s, as superhighways were taking over America, the Mackinaw Bridge was built. This shot now from the Lake Huron side, looking west (and a little north) at the bridge and Lake Michigan behind it.

I grew up with the bridge and never considered it anything particularly special, even each year when we biked across it to celebrate Labor Day. My father, who used to work on the car ferries that once connected the peninsulas, always hated the bridge. It may be that that's why he built our cottage a long ways outside of Mackinaw City, on idyllic, remote Trailsend Bay. We're close enough that you can bike into town to get an incredibly delicious fresh trout or whitefish to grill; but quiet enough that you can really bear down and get some work done, too. That's progressing well, I'm happy to say; Herr Wagner's bio is gradually yielding its secrets. In terms of my screenplay, it's become clear to me what the protagonist's chief desire is: he wants to be a god. What's scary about this story is that in a sense, he got what he wanted.

Pretty Daemmerung

2006-06-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

I've now been here in Mackinaw a week, and I have lots more fabulous pictures than this one; unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting the 'picture load' mechanism to work here! Well, that does keep the blog post entry more brief. This particular sunset was several days ago; we've had some nice ones since, but this one was particularly striking.

The water is still a bit chilly, and it's been getting cold at night. But the sun is terrific during the day, and I find the peace and quiet most conducive to an intense and sustained thinking effort. I've been working on my famous Wagner project; after now having physically been in each of the places where he lived, I'm going through his biography (a pile of his biographies, plus his hilarious autobiography) to get a more thorough bird's-eye-view of the whole thing. Rather than one two-hour film, it's obvious the story of his life could easily supply exciting and entertaining adventures enough to fill up a year-long TV show! But then we'd have to spread out our budget, and we'd be up Tony Palmer's creek. Two hours is the goal!

The Great North Woods

2006-06-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

At one point I thought it would be a good idea to post every day here with another picture taken from the same spot on our front porch, like Monet at Rouen Cathedral, chronicling the various interactions seen out there between wind, sun, cloud, water, light, trees, and flagpole. But I'm far too disorganized to do anything so SYSTEMATIC in a blog. I'm continually amazed I was organized enough to make it this far.

I've made it to the post-vacation vacation, settling down to an incredibly UNeventful few weeks after a wildly eventful few weeks, the dazzling urbanite heading off for more rustic pleasures, setting aside society for solitude, worrying not about 'am I gonna make this next train I'm supposed to catch' but instead about 'am I gonna finish reading this book/writing this scene/watching this dvd before it gets dark, since I seem to rise and set with the sun.'

So far, it's been really nice! Just to give you a little more sense of the location, here are photos from today's bike ride, along the beach road out to the west. Michigan once upon a time was a great big swamp, thus the low, flat, level country, the multitude of lakes, vistas like the one below, and the zillions of stinging, itching, annoying flies:

When I was a kid up here I had no idea how remote it really was. Instead, I assumed I'd grow up to be a scientist of some kind, since as a young 'un my chief interest was the biology and geology of the area. I realize now that was more about the dearth of anything interesting locally other than the environs and the flora and fauna. And, I should add, that stuff really is really interesting, and beautiful! Nature shot from this morning, a butterfly saying hi to a lily out in the backyard:

And here's a shot of what my father always referred to as "the mighty Carp". Wagner's Rhine it certainly is not; this little trickle of brown water flows from nearby Carp Lake into Lake Michigan a few miles from our bay. I was surprised to find that a little county park had sprung up near its mouth, where two decades ago there was basically only a rusted-out fence.

Below, an image of Trailsend Bay; in the distance, amid the green span of trees to the left, you can see a blip of white: that's the flag in front of my cottage (photographed so frequently for the tops of these blogs). Unfortunately in this low-res photo you can't very well see the two towers of the Mackinaw Bridge poking above those trees, amid the clouds in the distance. But I'll head up there tomorrow, or the next day, and get you a shot or two of the bridge and what's what in the village.

As you can see, today was a lovely day, although the white caps in the water give you a little indication of how darn windy it's been! Keeps the temperature down, making sun-bathing a little chilly; on the other hand, it blows the flies away, making sun-bathing possible. SIGH...damned if you do...

Changing Pace...

2006-06-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

And so, WagnerQuest 06 continues here in northern Michigan...I (and my luggage, a day later) made it all the way to the cottage, here "Up North" as we say, at my family's old summer place, where I'm currently lying in a protracted swoon trying to recover from the recent exertions. It's incredibly gorgeous up here; today, as you can see from the picture taken from the front porch, it's a little overcast (though still, Trailsend Bay on Lake Michigan is beautiful) but yesterday was northern summer at its best. Swimming, sailing, bicycling, beachwalks, cookouts, beachfires, getting eaten alive by blackflies...it's all here, plus a big pile of books on Richard Wagner and other relevant topics which I mailed on ahead.

My poor laptop is deader than disco, and all the other photos from my Wagner Quest are locked upon it, like fossils in a tar pit. I may try to find some help in this area (got to connect the data storage on the hard drive to a new system board ever to retrieve any of that info), but that may turn out to be impossible; this place is kind of remote. Fortunately, we have another laptop up here; and so, as the adventure continues, I'll continue to report here--although the story switches, at this point, from being an external to an internal journey. All aboard!

FAITH CRISIS OPERA: MIDSUMMER!

2006-06-17T07:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-15T00:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-14T00:52:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-06-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-12T02:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

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...

The Madness of the King

2006-06-07T14:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made a pilgrimage every Wagnerite must do once in a lifetime, to a region of the Bavarian Alps south of Munich where the landscape is alarmingly reminiscent of the beautiful Pacific Northwest. It was a lovely day, and an adventure principally characterized by sheer physical beauty, so I thought I'd let my pictures do most of the talking for me here.

This Wagner-connection is all about a Wagnerite who was obsessed with LOHENGRIN, which (like MACBETH) is an opera where you oughtn't say the name. What if I didn't say the king's name in this blog? You all know who it is; most of you have probably been to these places before. You don't say the name, just as the Hebrews don't pronounce the name of God, because it's impudent to name that over which you have no power--like putting a frame around the chaotic vastness of nature.

We went first to Schloss Linderhof, and got there just in time to see the fountain do its thing.

Linderhof is this king's attempt at making his own little Versailles. Well, that's a nice idea; but I knew Louis 14, and L2, you're no L14!

It's really absurd, how overdone this false late 19th-doing late 16th century Baroque style is. I promise I'll never again complain about any of the wealthy mansions out in North Bend, or Medina for that matter, after seeing the excesses of this man.

One thing that's fun about visiting it is the wild Babel of languages down there. You have to go on a guided tour, and it isn't cheap; but some of the tours are in German, some in English, and others everybody is listening to a headset in THEIR language. I'm assuming this king was as narrow-mindedly, xenophobically German as his favorite composer and mostly spoke German in his home; but I don't really know.

Anyways, we went there, then to Oberammergau, then to Neuschwanstein. (It was a busy day!) We saw Hohenschwangau in the distance, where it was being renovated, but didn't get up there. But these were enough!

Now, that last picture (and the final one below) were taken from the charming "Marienbrucke", a few minute's climb ABOVE the castle. This bridge crosses something called the Poellatschlucht, and I just like to say the word 'schlucht', meaning gorge: schlucht, schlucht, schlucht...

I'd jot down here my own skeptical reflections on this incredibly depressing, tragic story...but I gotta go catch a train out of Germany (hope to blog again in a few days!), and this blog is acting weird 'cause I have more pictures but it won't post them. This last one was taken by Anna, a young Muscovite who risked life and limb to climb with me way above the Marienbrucke in search of the perfect view of the castle.

Was Deutsch ist, und wahr und rein...

2006-06-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

My brief stay in Nürnberg took me right to the heart of lots of the big questions: what was Wagner really on about, what being German is all about, and why was I nervous when I first showed up in Germany a week ago. Some rambling thoughts on these questions:

Wagner. I came to Nürnberg in particular because it’s the location of perhaps my favorite Wagner opera, MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG. (It’s hard to pick a favorite Wagner opera. PARSIFAL could very easily be my favorite, as well. And do you consider the RING one opera? That’s crazy.) MEISTERSINGER is unusual among the Wagner operas, we always say, because it’s set on Planet Earth (the others having more mythic/supernatural elements). That’s probably not really the case; the biggest difference, I think, is that MEISTERSINGER is broadly diatonic. That’s why it seems to have more to do with Planet Earth: he’s writing in a musical language which, although distinctly Wagnerian, is far closer to the musical language the rest of humanity uses than some of his other operas (to me, TRISTAN and PARSIFAL are the most ‘Wagnerian’ sounding operas, if that means anything).

MEISTERSINGER is set on Planet Earth, without any magic except the kind that happens on a Midsummer Night when a bunch of young lovers get very confused about the proper course of action, and maybe there were fairies involved. (See? Just like MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM!) The only very specific location is the first act scene in St. Katherine’s church, which was destroyed during the war (like most of Nürnberg) and hasn’t really been rebuilt. There’s an outdoor stage now on that spot, with part of the original wall behind it:

The second act and first scene of the third act take place in or near Hans Sachs’ house, which I suppose one could find, although I didn’t. I did find this statue of him:

The final scene takes place in a field on the banks of the Pegnitz river, which winds its way through the walled city. I didn’t find any fields still existing, but it’s a lovely river, and indeed an incredibly lovely city, as these pictures indicate.

MEISTERSINGER is an incredibly lovely opera, because it’s Wagner’s most upbeat, optimistic work, unambiguously positive, outrageously funny, and the fullest expression ever of his really utopian humanism. Anyone who thinks Wagner is all about seeking death through sex must remember that MEISTERSINGER suggests a different value-system. Tristan (the man) is for me Wagner’s ludicrous selfishness pushed to its inevitably nihilistic conclusion. Anyone who loves himself that much, and has such disregard for others, will end up in Kareol clutching his wound in agony. But MEISTERSINGER is not about championing extreme individuality, it’s about community. That’s why the music is so diatonic, and contrapuntal—there are rules in place so that all these different melodies can live together in the same piece of music, as there are rules governing human behavior which allow a human community to exist—nay, to flourish.

In the RING, Wagner objects strenuously to a world based on rules; the rules, symbolized by Wotan’s spear, are the cause of lots of misery. And in MEISTERSINGER, the rules—symbolized by the Mastersingers’ endless musical forms and conventions and procedures and patterns—cause the protagonists terrible headaches, but Wagner doesn’t break the spear in MEISTERSINGER the way he does in the RING. In the end, the rules get validation and respect even as they are superseded by innovation and an outburst of genius that figures out a new way to do things.

I’ve got it, I can tell you the big difference between MEISTERSINGER and the rest of Wagner: most of his plots avoid anything mundane, being occupied rather with the divine/mythic/symbolic/weighted with tragic import. It’s one of the things that many people find ‘heavy’ about Wagner, how it seems to have so little to do with real life. But MEISTERSINGER is all about the little stuff—the specifics of how do you write a song, how do you make a shoe, what do you say to a pretty girl you spotted in the first row on your way out of church. I remember once watching a video of MEISTERSINGER (this was years ago, back in the distant days of video) after a long ‘retreat’ day spent with the board and directors of Seattle Opera, analyzing and discussing the future of our Young Artists Program. Boring stuff, mundane stuff, stuff you do at work. And how astonished I was to find that Wagner had set the exact same discussion to music, at the end of MEISTERSINGER Act One, as all the Mastersingers are arguing about what to do with the next generation of singers, about whether the public should have any voice in the future of art, about the proper relationship between tradition and innovation.

In my real life example, we’d been talking about opera singing; in MEISTERSINGER, Wagner is really talking about setting words to music, the writing of songs, the relationship between sound and sense. But the discussion applies to basically every human activity. The Mastersingers are crafting songs, but they’re all craftsmen in their other lives: cobblers, bakers, tailors, etc. And everything they make, they do by hand, with loving care and craft. Because that’s a crucial part of Wagner’s Utopian vision: HOMO FABER, man the maker, a vital relationship between who you are and what you make. Whether it’s a car, a cake, a building, a chair, a theatrical production, a book, a website, a student smarter, a sick person healthier, a nation stronger or more peaceful or more prosperous, WHAT WE MAKE=WHO WE ARE. Everything created counts as a work of art; everything manufactured thus deserves care and respect, and ought to be both beautiful and functional. It’s Tolkien’s thing with the elves, as I mentioned before. Being extra-human, everything the elves MAKE is somehow extra-special; elf-cloaks help you hide from your enemies, elf-bread is really light and unusually filling, elf-rope is somehow intelligent. If it’s magic, it’s the same as the magic of MEISTERSINGER; Walther ends up writing a song so good it is magical. The specifics of the magic are kept vague, in these kinds of stories, because we mustn’t think too literally about what the story is saying—metaphor is king. The great artistry of MEISTERSINGER lies in the layering and echoing of metaphors, images like John the Baptist, David, Eve, and the Garden—images we already know and connect with feelings and stories, and then deployed throughout MEISTERSINGER in a contrapuntal explosion of cross-references and metaphorical echoes. Wagner never took as much care MAKING anything as he did MEISTERSINGER.

I think it’s a valid point about a utopian society, or indeed any dream of a strong human community. Especially in our world, post-industrialization, where most makers are so far removed from the product they are making. I have a strange perspective on this issue because I work for an opera company, which is still operating more or less (disastrously, as far as our budget is concerned) according to a medieval-trade-guild-type structure: everything made for an opera production is made especially by skilled craftspeople in our Seattle Opera ‘school’. All the costumes, all the props, all the set pieces, every single supratitle lovingly hand-crafted. That’s great, that’s how to guarantee a good product—don’t have too many middlemen. It’s true that you in the audience don’t necessarily know which of our cutters made each particular costume; but there’s only about 20 of them, as opposed to when you buy a pair of jeans at the Gap, where you really have no way of knowing which little enslaved Asian monkey-child made that particular pair of pants. Frankly, the old Nürnberg guilds worked the same way: a crafted product (an alter-piece, or a portrait of Luther, or whatever) came from ‘the school of’ Lucas Cranach the Elder, or Albrecht Dürer, or whoever, it wasn’t necessarily created by the individual master artist himself, but by his team. If the Gap can have a signature logo, it’s certainly possible for such a team to have an identifiable style.

The problem is, there’s little room in our world today for anything that doesn’t make a profit, and craft of this kind is never going to make much of a profit. Profit comes from mass-producing your product very cheaply and making sure that everybody buys one; and that’s not what MEISTERSINGER is about. Honestly, the system presented in MEISTERSINGER makes far more sense to me; it seems sustainable, unlike the profit-driven system. Eventually, Planet Earth will run out of hidden reserves of gasoline, and then people with cars will really be in trouble (we may very well have melted the ice caps and drowned everybody, or destroyed mankind with nuclear war, well before that point, it’s true); what happens when the profit-driven economy runs out of potential profit?

Anyways, I can’t ramble on about MEISTERSINGER without pointing out the problem with it. It’d be such a lovely opera—if only Hans Sachs, Wagner’s fantasy vision of the best man he himself could possibly be, didn’t give that stupid speech at the end, warning all of Germany: “Watch out for Jews and for the French! They’re up to no good! Only trust your German masters!” But yes, it’s here, in this opera, in that one little speech, that Wagner really does sound like a Nazi. Sometimes you cut it, when you put MEISTERSINGER on today; oftentimes you have the guy sing it, but somehow undercut it with the staging.

My trip to Nürnberg gave me a slightly different perspective on the problem. A couple things I’ve learned recently:

The Nazis didn’t look evil. To Americans, the Nazis have become cartoon stereotypes of evil. When you call someone a Nazi, as an insult, it seems to most people an overstatement—maybe the person is a jerk, but no one in our world today, it seems, could ever be quite as evil as the lowest-ranking Nazi. We’ve seen so many movies featuring wildly evil Nazis, stories of suspense where the very presence of a Nazi onscreen chills the blood and makes you tense; and the history has been taught so glibly, in most of our schools, that I think it’s hard for many of us to realize: the really dangerous thing about evil is that it can be incredibly seductive. It can look just the same as good. Much of what the Nazis stood for we might applaud: strong individuals, strong communities, order, discipline, security, etc. Remember that the common man-in-the-street hadn’t read 'Mein Kampf', probably didn’t really understand the Nazi political agenda, and certainly didn’t know about the mass murders and genocides. Similarly, the average American today understands that we’re at war; but the media is doing a wonderful job of protecting us from seeing the truth of that war, and we haven’t begun to feel the economic impact. When you are in a group, are you honestly good at noticing when a terrible decision is being made? And in that situation, are you strong enough to stand up and speak out against the decision? And brave enough to sever your ties with the group, if no one pays heed to what you are saying?

The Jews were emancipated too quickly. Take heed, gays! It was Richard Wagner who said it: “We weren’t ready for the Jews, they were freed too quickly.” Remember, the Jews had been kept in ghettoes for thousands of years in Germany and across Europe, and it was Napoleon (and behind him, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment) who ‘emancipated’ European Jewry in the 1810s—made it possible, at long last, for Jews to have the same rights and opportunities as anyone else. In Paris, this went over great; in places where the Enlightenment thought hadn’t yet reached, this didn’t go over so well. And Naziism was at heart a radical conservative movement, fantasizing about recreating a society like the one in MEISTERSINGER—so “Hey, you Jews! Back into your ghettoes!” Or worse, much much worse, with the new technology and weird new godless philosophies that make it okay to kill human beings. The point is, it was 120 years after the emancipation that this backlash happened with such appalling severity. These things take time, lots and lots of time. Perhaps food for thought to gays impatient with the slow process of acquiring civil rights, pushing for legalized gay marriage, and so forth. A generation or two ago, gays were as vigorously despised a minority as Jews ever were in Germany. Things have come a long way; but when you move too fast the backlash can be fearsome. The generation that’s currently in high school in America seems (to me at least, an occasional visitor in our nations' high schools) to be considerably less homophobic than even my generation (I graduated from high school in 1991). Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t give up any ground; but wait until our parents’ generation are all dead. When the people graduating from high school today are in their 60s (say in 2045) maybe the world will be ready for so radical a restructuring of human society. By then, same-sex partnerships will probably be a much-needed method of dealing with overpopulation!

Unifying? Great! Why stop at a nation? Nürnberg has a big wall around the old city, a reminder of its long-held status as the ‘free, imperial’ city. That is, there was no such thing as the country of Germany until the 1870s; there was a loose affiliation of states, sometimes called the “Holy Roman Empire”, and variously administered from different spots, but Nürnberg was a popular site for an imperial headquarters since it belonged to no bigger kingdom but was a free city that ran itself. The push toward German unification began in earnest after the fall of Napoleon, when Wagner was a little kid; he got involved, everybody got involved, and after the Franco-Prussian war (and some little war in the 1870s between Bavaria and Prussia, the two big chunks that came together to make up the new nation of Germany—Prussia won, that’s why the capitol is Berlin) there was for the first time a legitimate German nation. But if they were a serious nation, they needed an empire, like the French and the Dutch and the English and the Spanish; and certainly Hitler’s agenda included further imperial aggression—his idea was to expand the German reich to conquer the entire globe, eliminate all the vermin races, and have Germans in charge everywhere (with some of the other people kept alive as slaves). All of which follows, in a horribly logical progression, from that initial push for unification of an assemblage of diverse states.

This is why I’m uncomfortable. Now of course America basically defeated Germany in both world wars, and we got the world empire that the Germans wanted. In fact, it worked much the same way, because in the 1860s as Germany was uniting as a nation, so was America; from a loose confederacy of states to one vast federalized behemoth, with imperial ambitions. And while we haven’t been as bloodthirsty and violent in our territorial aggression (or as insanely genocidal) as the Germans were in World War II, the basic American attitude—that we’re better than everybody else, that all of them should learn to do everything our way, and that inevitably, eventually, THEY WILL—this is eerily reminiscent of what was happening here. Germany reminds me of America in many, many ways: both nations are vast and complicated, full of different kinds of environments, different kinds of communities, different kinds of people. Hard to make generalizations about these places! Both really love cars (although I think Americans like the convenience of cars, whereas the Germans like and take pride in making them). If I had to make crude generalizations about the German national character (I went to a fascinating exhibit today at Nürnberg’s Germanisches Museum, all about “What is German?") I’d say they are big on order, on rules and restrictions, to contrast them with the Danes, who are really big on individual freedom. I think there’s something reassuring to a German about ‘Dies ist verboten/das ist verboten’, a kind of security that comes from knowing the limits. I find it kind of annoying, but then again I’m much more Danish in this than I ever knew. I discovered this about myself when the smoking ban went into effect in Seattle last winter; although I’d been terribly anti-smoking, prejudiced against smokers, for years, now that legally they were second-class citizens, I FELT without knowing why exactly that what we were doing was wrong, that they should be allowed to smoke if they feel like killing themselves, that I had no right whatsoever to tell them how to behave. It’s not exactly an American maverick/individual thing; it’s about valuing freedom, honest-to-goodness freedom to do anything whatsoever (short of harming another) more than anything. Which is what I value, although I don’t know if it’s a good thing. And that uncertainty--plus being an American--makes me nervous.

Back to Bayreuth

2006-06-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

I spent the day today scurrying around Bayreuth, the little town in Franconia (part of Bavaria) where Wagner built his Festspielhaus. It was a holiday—Pfingster, a Christian celebration of something-or-other, I never quite understood, but it had to do with the Holy Ghost saying “Hey, world! Jesus made it to heaven!” and all of Germany was taking the day off (the country is nowadays 1/3 Catholic, 1/3 Protestant, 1/3 mezzo-nothing. And it sounds like very few go to church with any regularity; but they do like to party). Luckily for me, the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth has no interest in Christian holidays, so not only was it open, but I more or less had the place to myself.

I’d been there once before; 10 years ago, in the summer of 1996, when through the good graces of Perry Lorenzo and Verena Kossodo of the New York Wagner Society I managed to get a seat at a performance of GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG. And I remember going to the Villa Wahnfried Wagner Museum with Perry, back when we were both young and idealistic. Wandering through it again today, it’s amazing to me how much has happened since then—in those days there was no Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, I hadn’t really written any supertitles, and the world knew nothing of the Zambello TRISTAN, the Stephen Wadsworth RING, or the Israel/Rochaix PARSIFAL. Not to mention THEFT OF THE GOLD. And we didn’t understand the first thing about PowerPoint, or projectors, or dvds, or even laptops for that matter; I don’t think I went online that entire month-long trip. My father was alive, and Elizabeth Stetson, and a number of other people we know and love Now, on the other side of all those things, it was good to go back to Bayreuth and think: what next?

To begin with, there’s the Seattle Opera Wagner Competition, this August, brainchild of the great Rebecca Chawgo. It’s a more formal way of doing what Speight Jenkins has always been so good at doing: spotting baby Wagner singers and trying to steer them in the right direction. Our Young Artists Program is all about the 20-something singers; the Wagner Competition, which may become a regular thing at Seattle Opera, will focus on the 30-somethings who have the potential to become Wagner singers (because let’s face it, not all singers do). This summer we’ll hear 10 of these people, in a program that features each of them in a solo; and a panel of judges will award a generous prize to the top female and top male vocalist, to be used for further study and training. So think ‘American Idol’ with lots more winged helmets than usual.

Next, there’s...well, why should I go on telling you what’s next? You’ll find out in time! Instead, let me say briefly, about Villa Wahnfried (left), Wagner’s house was built in the 1870s when he chose Bayreuth for his festival theater and moved here with his entourage of insane hangers-on and family; it was destroyed in the war, and eventually rebuilt as a museum. Unlike the Goethe-haus museum in Weimar, it isn’t really set up “as it was when Wagner lived here”; instead, you walk through each room according to an order and follow the story of his life, from weird adventure to weird adventure and opera to opera, with lots of pictures and blurbs and facsimiles of original manuscripts and what-not. I wish more of the pictures here were available generally, because many of them are just amazing. When you get to Wagner’s death, they have the tiny, nasty couch on which he died and his death mask; and then the exhibit starts going through the Bayreuth productions of his operas, with truckloads of designs and pictures especially from the early years. When you get to the more recent stuff, there’s a room with several computer terminals; all the Bayreuth productions of everything since 1951 are catalogued on a fascinating computer archive, which cross-references ever performance by opera, calendar, and performers. There are zillions of pictures, biographical entries, sound clips, and video clips; I only wish this archive were either a) available online or b) published in computer disc form!

Behind the house you find the double grave of Wagner and Cosima. And if you walk from the house through the town, past the train station, and up the famous ‘Green Hill’ you get to the Festspielhaus, which was closed tighter than a drum today (I suspect they’re in early rehearsals for the operas which will open at the end of the summer). Still, it’s a fascinating building, even from the outside—originally intended as a temporary building, which would be torn down after the first festival in 1876, but it has survived to this day and is still one of the world’s greatest and most sophisticated theaters. The whole concept of ‘Regie-theater’—director’s theater, where the audience doesn’t see the time and place where the composer set the action—that all began here, in 1951, when Wagner’s grandson Wieland wanted to re-open the Festival and continue performing his grandfather’s operas, but needed to disassociate them from the Nazi stigma that had gotten attached to those swords and horned helmets. So Wieland changed the time and place (he made it extremely vague, the visuals done very simply and most of the interest in the lighting) and suddenly a) the Wagner operas were relevant to the new post-Nazi age, b) they were suddenly universal myths, not solely German myths, and c) the job of the stage director suddenly got a hell of a lot more interesting than it had ever been. Since then, perhaps we’ve gone too far (the most recent Bayreuth Parsifal allegdly stars projected time-lapse video footage of a dead, decaying rabbit) but if you’re a singer it’s nice not to have to wear those stupid helmets.

The Thuringia-Saxony Axis

2006-06-04T14:11:00.000-07:00

I’m way behind on blogging my trip adventures, so here very quickly (yeah, right! This is Wagner) are a few memories of my recent escapades:

Leipzig. I went to Leipzig technically because it’s an important Richard Wagner spot—he was born and went to school there. (Actually, they moved to Dresden when he was still a baby, and then sent him back to high school and university in Leipzig when he was about 13. He was a terrible student and basically flunked out of every class he ever took.) But I found the Wagner pickings pretty slim; there’s a plaque on the building where he was born, which is now a low-budget department store.

Wagner would be pleased, I’m sure, to know that outside the place where he was born there’s a big rubber contraption; you wrap bungie cords around your children and watch them bounce upon and down on trampolines for a while, and when they come out they’re more docile. If only somebody had done that to him when he was a kid, we all might have been a lot better off!

The real tourist draw to Leipzig is not Wagner, but the others: Johann Sebastian Bach in particular, but Schumann and Mendelssohn and others also spent much of their lives here. Bach was cantor for many years at the St. Thomas church, left (and Wagner was expelled from the St. Thomas school behind the church). A particularly great experience was hearing a Bach cantata sung in the church, as part of Bach Fest ’06, by the really wonderful team working there. I could understand most of the sermon, too, which shows you how my German works: talk to me about God and spirit and ghosts and dragons and swords and I’m fine; try to explain to me how to use the laundromat and I’m so hopeless this very sweet girl ended up washing all my clothes for me, while a stood there gawking like an idiot. (The point is: the clothes are clean! That’s what counts.)

As I mentioned, yesterday turned out to be Goth day in Leipzig.

I got more of the story from two university students today, who were very excited that all these Goths were descending upon their city from all over Germany (although neither felt compelled to dress all in black themselves). I remain dubious about the whole enterprise. The fun thing for me, about the Stadt Fest in Leipzig, was passing a booth where this guy in a Hun helmet (that’s a Germanic tribe, not a Viking or Scandinavian tribe—get it right!) served me some mead-beer.

Now, I’ve often had mead-wine (I seem to remember forcing many of you to drink it, much against your will); but this was closer to what the Vikings would have been drinking, basically a very, very sweet beer made entirely from honey. I tell you, travel is all about pushing back boundaries, having new experiences, eating and drinking things you’ve never before dared to try.

Weimar. I blathered here at great length the other day about seeing the Midsummer Night’s Dream here in Weimar; this is a lovely city (much sleepier than Leipzig) with an incredible theater and lots of Goethe stuff. (No Wagner stuff that I’ve found, although he came through here off and on.) Goethe made Weimar the headquarters of the German enlightenment in the late 18th-century, and just as he is (to me) the central writer in the German language, so the town to me typifies what is best about Germany. It’s small, pretty, clean, well-laid out, and has far more than its fair share of culture. In addition the theater, and lots of bookstores, and museums where Goethe and Schiller used to live (Goethe’s house, above, is set up exactly as it was when he died in 1850, and open to the public), and old and new art museums, there’s the Bauhaus museum (yep, they were here) as well as the castle of the Dukes of Saxe-Weimar. Tonight I didn’t feel like I’d be successful following a performance of Schiller’s Maria Stuarda, so I went instead to the little art-house Kino in downtown Weimar—(it was SIFF withdrawal, I’ll admit it)—where they’d never heard of Da Vinci Code or X3. And congratulate me on doing a pretty good job of following the dubbed-into-German Spanish/Argentine old-folks-fall-in-love flick, Fred and Elsa. But while you’re at it, don’t forget the historical role Weimar played as the center of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, back in the 1920s. So even though it’s not technically on the Wagner tour of Germany, I thought it was well worth a stop. And the Goethe-haus was a great way to foreshadow tomorrow’s trip to Villa Wahnfried, Wagner’s house in Bayreuth!

Eisenach. I took a quick day trip out to Eisenach, the small town beneath the hill upon which towers the mighty WARTBURG.

It’s a huge tourist trap, and really not all that exciting; but I had to go, since this is the location of Tannhäuser, one of the few Wagner operas I’ve never titled—and one of his most German operas. (The other is Tannhäuser’s companion-piece, Meistersinger, and we’ll go there next.) The Wartburg’s claim to fame, apart from its scenic location, rests on four points of history: a) St. Elisabeth of Hungary married the Thuringian king and moved here in the high middle ages, where she was associated with all sorts of miracles and did good Catholic saint-type things. b) The famous battle of the minnesingers, a sort of medieval German rap-artist kick-dust-on-the-other-guy’s-pants “I’m a better singer than you” championship was famously held here. c) Martin Luther, fleeing the Catholics, was given sanctuary here and wrote the first ever German translation of the New Testament, thereby starting the Reformation; and d) in the 19th century, Romantics like Wagner got obsessed in old German history and so Wagner wrote his Tannhäuser, hopelessly garbling the already ahistorical legends that had started to spring up about this place. Below, the room from which Martin Luther founded the Protestant church.

I’ve always had a peculiar relationship with Tannhäuser; I wonder what will happen when (if?) I ever get an opportunity to do some titles for it. The overture has been a favorite piece of mine since childhood. But I never particularly cared for the rest of the opera; always thought the music was a tad staid and the story stupid, in fact, until I finally saw it onstage a few years ago at the Met, in the old Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen production from the late ‘70s (their first Met production, and the one that indicated to the Met that this team was good at doing campy Disney-medieval Wagner). My problem had always been disliking the characters and the basic set-up. Tannhäuser, the great medieval German songwriter/singer, needs to choose between two women, and thereby choose between the sacred and the profane, between the classical antiquity of Greece and the medieval Christianity of Germany. When the opera begins, he’s living as the love slave of the goddess Venus, who hangs out with a bunch of fauns and nymphs in a grotto underneath the Hörselberge near Eisenach. The idea is, when Christianity conquered Europe, the old gods—all these mythological characters from ancient Greece—simply went underground, where they continue their revels, and the local Christians fear and hate them. Wagner was fascinated by what happens when new gods replace old gods, and deals with this question in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, and of course the Ring and Parsifal. (If the issue comes up in Meistersinger, it must be in the great hymn to Sachs as Martin Luther.) Anyways, the idea is you’ve got a strictly conservative Christian society above ground (think GWB and his junta) and, below ground, those of us who live on Capitol Hill. I didn’t actually make it into the caves, but here’s a bad shot of the Hörselberge, taken from a moving train:

But Tannhäuser is bored of the sensual pleasures of Venus and goes back up to earth, where his old girlfriend the saintly Elisabeth of Hungary is still faithful to him. So faithful that even when it becomes clear to everyone upstairs that he’s been a sinner—that he’s been downstairs, to Venus’s land—Elisabeth loves him so much that she prays herself to death, and he is somehow redeemed.

Now I’ve always thought Venus and Elisabeth were two pretty lame images of women, and I also felt that Tannhäuser (like many another Wagnerian hero, and like Wagner himself) was a bit of an ass. It’s never made any sense to me, to try to separate out your sexual feelings from any other kind of love; and I don’t quite buy the basic world-view of the opera, which seems to be that what Tannhäuser has done is wrong (the way I find what Siegmund and Sieglinde do revolting, no matter how much I’m cheering at the end of the Walküre first act). I find the story, on the surface, a lot of fuss about nothing. When I faced Tannhäuser’s dilemma myself, many years ago, I moved out of the conservative midwest and never looked back.

But when I saw the opera live, for the first time, I noticed that a) I really liked the music, that what was conventional and predictable on the page nevertheless works in the theater and b) for me, the central character was the baritone, Wolfram von Eschenbach, another minnesinger (who in real life wrote the amazing Parzival poem which partially inspired Wagner’s last opera) who is friend to Tannhäuser and in unrequited, unconsummated love for Elisabeth. At the end of the opera, Wolfram stands center stage, with the corpse of the sinner Tannhäuser to his right and the corpse of the saint Elisabeth to his left, and it’s wonderful because he stands for us, neither saints nor terrible sinners most of us, but needing in each of our lives to weave our way between the demands of the body and the demands of the spirit, between good and evil, between desire, self-denial, fulfillment, and satiation, between whatever competing cultures are making claims on our loyalty. And that need makes him write Parzifal.

I’d tell you how all those issues are playing out with me on this trip (including more about the grottoes of Venus I’ve been visiting)...but this isn't that kind of blog! So let me instead show you a few pictures of the Wartburg! Here’s a photo of the castle up close:

Here’s the hall of song, where Act Two theoretically take place (actutally it took place in a less photogenic room downstairs, but the audience won’t know that):

And here’s the view from the ramparts, of the forest through which we pilgrims trod, with weary feet, as we ascended to the glorious heights. Set Act I Scene 2 and Act 3 in here somewhere!

One last thing to add about Thuringia: the beer is great, but I’m never going to be a fan of the bratwurst. On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to find decent Turkish food all over Germany, for very very cheap. And the Turks know from cooking!

Jon’s Midsummer Trip Dream

2006-06-04T13:59:00.000-07:00

Today was Leipzig’s Stadt Fest, a big town festival, drawing unusual numbers of people to the usually crowded downtown of Leipzig, one of eastern Germany’s coolest cities. It was also a festival for local lesbians, who were holding court over in the university district; and Goths, seemingly from all over the country, descended on Leipzig like crebain from Dunland. The endless parade of people in black, many of them too overweight to pull off a successful ‘Goth’ look, reminded me of what I was reading this time last year: Seattle Opera was producing the Ring (like every tiny town in mittel Europa is right now) and there wasn’t a whole lot of prep work for me, since I’d done it before; so our Production Assisstant, the wondrous Marta Johnson, fed me, episode by episode, all of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman epic—a disturbing, disorganized, fascinating meditation, in comic book form, on the nature of dreams and stories. “I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” And the other night, as I lay in the long grass under the elder tree on the banks of the Elbe, like Anselmus, I recalled his wondrous dreaming, and Richard Wagner’s, which began in the same spot but which was in a weird way real. Or at least, he somehow made it real.

My own dream—my film project, and unfortunately there are now two of them—is to build a structure where we can compare and contrast all these competing dreams, realities, and whatever else may or may not exist.

The idea has been in my head for a long time. Let me explain in more detail. Film operates very differently than theater; when you SEE things, even things which never existed, you know and believe them in a way you never can in the theater (what with suspension of disbelief and all). The sky turned round for me, on this topic, when I was 18 and first watched Zefirelli’s weird film of Otello. Although I’d make a different movie of this opera if I were doing it today, I was and still am blown away by the most simple and powerful trick in film—when a character is narrating something, go film it! Example: the first act ends with the awesome duet “Già nella notte densa,” in which the libretto recaps all the important stuff from the otherwise deleted Shakespeare’s Act One. Lots of stories—how Otello wooed Desdemona with stories, the content of those stories, how they fell in love. And Verdi’s music falls into the cracks between every word—the music acts out the stories and stories-within-stories for us, as it were. But onstage, in the theater, what you SEE is a tenor and soprano, usually kind of ridiculous and/or offensive looking, and maybe every now and then they’ll cup each other’s hands in that “squirrel paws” position which all opera singers seem genetically pre-determined constantly to do, and which I so abhor and revile. I’ve only ever once seen anyone do that in real life—and he’s now running for state congressman from my neighborhood.

What do we see in Zefirelli? All the stories! Including the ones they’re telling, ones in the Shakespeare first act, even stories Zefirelli obviously made up. But it’s brilliant. Not only does it give us something to look at—film is a visual medium and he’s a gorgeous filmmaker—it guves us MORE INFO about the characters and their story. A great story thoughtfully told, as I said before. Instead of distracting us with an irrelevant and annoying visual, which can sometimes happen in the theater. So—the obvious thing to do would be to film Wagner’s Ring à la Zefirelli, showing the audience what the characters are talking about whenever the Ring goes into one of its zillions of narrations. A nice idea, but it will never happen. There isn’t that much money in the world, and frankly, the resulting film would be unwatcheable. The Ring ought to be experienced live, in the theater. (Methinks theater directors might look at including film techniques and technologies in their arsenal of story-telling tools...) What we can do, however, is make a film about Wagner’s life—let’s get it out by 2013, the bicentenerary of his birth—and do a few spots from his operas, filmed à la Zefirelli, with the CG technical prowess of a Peter Jackson—and use the medium to show the tremendous gulf between the world of his imagination and the world in which he lived (and tried to make his dream come to life).

Brief digression over my second film project, hitherto unmentioned—it actually fits in really well right here. I think we should make a fancy Peter Jackson & Co special effects spectacular film on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, one of my all-time favorite stories, a story about this exact same issue, and not coincidentally one of Wagner’s favorite stories too. (Once, when no one was paying any attention to him at a party he was hosting, Wagner emitted a piercing shriek and then informed the assembled company that he was now going to read The Golden Pot—all 100 pages of it—to them out loud. Charming man!) The story concerns the strange adventure of the young Student Anselmus (think a youngish Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton film), who we find near the top of the story, sleeping, like Bottom, like me the other night, in the long grass beneath the elder tree on the banks of Dresden’s lovely Elbe at sunset. He falls hopelessly in love with three snakes, who appear in the grass and dazzle him; eventually, he gets a job copying out arcane texts in some language and alphabet he doesn’t understand, employed by the eccentric old town archivist (who turns out to be the spirit of phosphorous and father of the three snakes); embroiled in an all-out war between a Titania and Oberon type pair), he ends up imprisoned in a glass jar; and....well, you’ll see how it ends after we make the movie!

It’s a freakishly bizarre, wildly comic, soul-lifting, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck-ruffling-with-a-sigh beauty of a story, all about what it means to be an artist. Anselmus has this strange epiphany—he doesn’t understand what happened to him, when he meets the snakes, all he knows is that everything else that’s ever happened to him in his life is insignificant in comparison with this experience. He has taken the first step on the road to being an artist. But the road is difficult, beset by obstacles and dangers (and weird helpers like the archivist’s parrot) and the ever-present danger of falling off the road, getting bottled and thus ceasing to be an artist (becoming a bureacrat, a functionary, an unknown citizen, a mere consumer). It’s a story which has to be read to be believed, and has to be made into a film if we are to see what we’re up against.

Or—we could just make the Wagner film. Because they tell the same story, and my guess is we might have an easier time raising money for a film about Wagner, whom many more people than me find fascinating.

The idea would be something along the lines of Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh’s brilliant recreation of the Victorian period and the creation of The Mikado (beginning with the debacle of their previous show, Ruddigore or Princess Ida or whatever it was). This film (title suggestions, anyone?) to follow the process of creating the Ring—a vast subject, so we’ll have to be careful to keep it to 2 hours. Example: it would be easy to do the Shaffer/Forman trick, from Amadeus, of cutting from footage of Barbara Brynne as Mozart’s annoying mother-in-law shrieking at him to a shot of the Queen of the Night chirping. I contend that every character in the Ring cycle has some parallel in the composer’s biography, and would be happy to talk your ear off explaining each and ever one of them. But in the end, I don’t think this would be all that interesting (although it certainly would take up a huge amount of screen time). It would vindicate Freud’s theory about all art being sublimation of neurosis—but this I’d really rather not do, because the magical thing to me is that Wagner’s neurosis caused him to create this art—which, two hundred fifty years later, speaks so beautifully and interestingly to me without my really knowing him or his neurosis. Again, to phooey with Freud, says I.

Far more interesting than the Freudian approach is discussion of one simple biographical fact: after the first performance of the complete Ring in 1876, at the end of the first-ever Götterdämmerung, Wagner refused to join the curtain call. He was thoroughly disgusted with the production, and according to his assistant director’s diary he sat in his dressing room fuming, cursing everyone involved in the ordeal and accusing them all of betraying him. “Next year, we’ll do everything differently,” he said, famously. Well, it never happened; after the first Ring summer he was so deeply in debt he never produced or heard it again. He only ever saw it once in his own life, his dream become reality—and he hated it. Reality, once again, had failed to live up to imagination.

I doubt this film will end there, on that endlessly depressing note; but it might be a great place to start. Then we’d go back and try to figure out how we got there; and then, conclude in some place in between dreams and reality—where life itself must exist.

Now, you Perfect Wagnerites out there reading me in blog-land are probably thinking, “Honestly, Jon...it’s been done.” (Well...not a Golden Pot film, to the best of my knowledge.) True, there have been Wagner bio-pics before now. I’ve only ever seen two: the endless Tony Palmer/Richard Burton thing from the early 80s, which I found wrong-headed and incredibly tedious; and an earlier one, one of the first feature-length German films, a silent movie about 75 minutes long filmed in the teens and starring a contemporary Italian composer who oddly resembled Wagner (the way Robert Powell looked like both Jesus and Gustav Mahler). To conclude an enormous (but crucial!) blog post, some thoughts about those films and what mine would do differently:

Silent Film. This is a wonderful document, restored and presented in Seattle recently by Paul Fryer. (The original music was lost, and I didn’t think much of the newly prepared soundtrack.) It was a hagiography from the pre-Hitler days of the Bayreuther Blätter, and as such incredibly entertaining if you know the real story and probably kind of dull if you don’t—all the outrageous behavior and self-destructive tendencies of this terribly flawed man were concealed, even though that’s precisely what an audience would find interesting. I loved this film for one particular feature, which I fully intend to steal: every time Richard Wagner sat down to write an opera, we cut to footage from a scene from that opera. He was sitting at his desk, for example, scribbling away with a sad look in his eye, and suddenly there were Wotan and Brünnhilde on the rock, tearfully saying their farewells. An old-timey, 1912 Wotan and Brünnhilde (something you can’t see anywhere today) with those absurd helmets and breastplates and all that hair. Yes—our 1912 film cut to scenes from the operas, as they looked in 1912! Which makes it a valuable historical document, although the reaction of a modern film audience will inevitably be: “Gee, they sure look goofy!”

Palmer/Burton Thing. It ended up being about 9 hours long; it didn’t make a lick of sense if you didn’t already know all about Wagner’s life; and frankly, the soundtrack was a disgrace. The great thing about the movie Amadeus, if you ask me—actually there are any number of great things about it, the great thing that’s relevant here—is that the music was treated as seriously as the picture. They got Neville Marriner in from the start of the project, story-boarded musical sequences, recorded every piece especially for the film, and the result was a new generation (I was 10 when that first came out) fell in love with Mozart. I don’t know much about the specifics of what Palmer did to get his music; it’s always sounded to me like he got rights from Decca London to use up to 3 minutes from any one of their Solti Wagner recordings, because we keep hearing the same few moments over and over again—Mime’s misery, Tristan’s wound, Ludwig’s Lohengrin-ish frenzy. There’s a moment or two where they filmed Peter Hofmann and Gwyneth Jones as Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, I think, but really it was shocking the disregard that movie had for musical values. This is a movie about music! You start with the music and build your way backwards from there.

A couple of other things annoyed me about the Palmer film. Occasionally there was a narrator, who spoke in the first person—although I could never figure out who he was supposed to be, and he never gave helpful narration such as “Then Wagner and his wife had to cross the Baltic Sea to escape from creditors in Riga”, for example—instead, we see a low-budget boat-in-stormy-sea shot, and, since it’s out of sequence, if you don’t already know the story you’re hosed. The cast list was strong—too many British accents, if you ask me, since most of the characters are German or Swiss—but too many characters, and not enough set-up for each one.

And I’m sorry, but I really think Burton missed the point. He had all of Wagner’s repulsive qualities, but none of his charm and charisma—which must have been considerable—and none of his mania, which everyone who knew him found remarkable. Said Robert Schumann, another of Leipzig’s greatest sons: “For me, Wagner is impossible. There’s no doubt that he’s an intelligent person, but he never stops talking. You can’t talk all the time.” I imagine someone with the energy of Robin Williams in the role—a little out of control, scary/edgy, but entertaining. And I don’t think it’s worth making the film withough the right person in the role, an actor who might come close to this one-of-a-kind personality.

Seeking Richard. (For lack of a better title, we’ll go with the name of this blog.) This film will offer three things:
a) The imagination of Richard Wagner filmed with all the Peter Jackson fancy CG stuff we can get our hands on. Imagine our end of Götterdämmerung, visualized by Weta Workshop! Imagine the Siegfried Act 3 scene change, as Siegfried sounds his horn and ascends up into the fire—as the horn motif wrestles with the fire motif, we see Siegfried wrestling with a cool CG Loge (maybe he’s like Johnny Fire from Fantastic Four), like Jacob and the Angel, until finally Siegfried wins—only now his flesh is scorched, he is now touched by the fire god, and has become a sun good—thus Brünnhilde salutes him, “Heil dir, Sonne”. Thus the sun rises and sets in Götterdämmerung with his horn motif now made divine. Imagine the cameras spinning around the fjord and the ships as the Dutchman’s chorus competes with Daland’s; imagine the entry of the gods into Valhalla atop a real rainbow; imagine each of Kundry’s crazed flashbacks brought expressionistically to life. Like the Freudian find-the-art-in-the-neurosis temptation, the possibilities here boggle the mind.
b) But we’ll tame them, rein them in, by choosing ones we can then immediately juxtapose with the reality Wagner saw in his own theater; a filmed Siegfried scaring Mime with a CG bear, for example, followed by the grotesque and absurd charade you always see in the theater. And it will become very clear why he was so disappointed, at that first-ever Götterdämmerung.
And c) the most important point of all: I promise to tell a great story thoughtfully. The human story of what it took to create the Ring—the huge sacrifices made by Minna, Otto, Mathilde, Cosima, Hans, Ludwig, and others. What Peter Jackson showed me, in his astonishing film about that other Ring, is that no matter how fancy your CG must be, a good story is always about PEOPLE. There are some really interesting people in the story of the Ring’s genesis, and if we build a screenplay which forces the film to treat them as real people, we’ll have quite a tale to tell.

Deutschland’s “Firenze-am-Elbe”

2006-06-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

I knew very little about Dresden before I got there. I knew it had a beautiful opera house, demolished in the war and then rebuilt; I knew R Wagner had achieved something along the lines of normal worldly success when he lived here in the 1840s, before he went off the deep end and underwent the transformation that changed the successful, popular author of Lohengrin into the mad genius who forged Das Rheingold. And I knew that Dresden had been called Germany’s “Florence on the Elbe”—the way East Lansing, MI likes to refer to itself as “the Boston of the Midwest”. But the name is well deserved. Dresden is honestly one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit, even though my stay there was way too brief. I concentrated on five things:

The Frauenkirche.

Completely demolished in the war, this early 18th-century church is the heart of the city—so imagine what a great source of civic pride it was when the rebuilt church was reopened last fall. (Everywhere else you go in the city you see re-constrcution projects proceeding apace.) The church is built from Saxon sandstone found nearby (Dresden is the capitol of the state of Sächsen, Saxony, from whence came one half of the Anglo-Saxon group, who set up in England ‘East Saxon-land’ (Essex) and ‘South Saxon-land’ (Sussex) before being raped by Vikings and conquered by French Norsemen. But that’s another story, and hardly relevant here. Sorry.) It’s the tallest thing in Dresden, by law, and from the top of the dome (100 m or so) you get an amazing view of the city and the river.

Inside the church proper, all is air, light, and pastel.

The contemplative underground crypt, where they were playing Enya while setting up for the evening’s concert, was too much for me.

Semper Oper.
Or, “Opera Forever!” What a slogan; we had t-shirts printed last summer, for sale in our gift shop, which read “Life is Short / Opera is Long / Wagner is Forever”. The architect Gottfried Semper designed this opera house to match the nearby, Baroque, Zwinger Palace. The architectural style in which he was working was thus about a century old—and when the theater was restored, after the war, the style was more than two centuries old. No matter, it’s a dazzling building. Richard Wagner was Kappelmeister working for this company, but never in this building—it was built after he was exiled for playing a role in the Dresden uprising of 1849. (He had tried to get Semper to join the revolutionaries, too, but the architect knew better than to follow his common-sense-challenged composer friend. Later, Semper would work with Wagner to design a glorious new theater in Munich—a theater which was never built. I was also delighted to find the building where Wagner lived, right across from the Zwinger Palace, in luxury he couldn’t afford, amassing his famous Dresden library.

Now, when I first got to the Semper Oper, there was quite a to-do; somebody was making a film with the opera as backdrop for a shot. Seemed to be a music video or music dream-sequence of some kind, since the camera on a big dolly kept swinging down onto an old man with white hair, singing (the sync-tape was broadcast for each take) a well-known waltz the name of which is escaping me. Viennese but with a dark eastern melodic contour.

In the shot, while he sang, pairs of attractive young people swirled around him, waltzing.

And of course a crowd of tourists (including me) had gathered to gawk. I, of course, was busily storing up ideas about how to film in Dresden for when I create my own magnificent up-and-coming Wagner bio-pic!

Zwinger Palace.

I was disappointed to find that the Dresden museum with paintings by C. D. Friedrich, one of my favorite painters, was closed for renovation (always check these things on the website first!). So I went instead to the outrageously beautiful Zwinger Palace, right next to Semper Oper, to check out the Alte Meister Gallery, their collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. You all know the detail of a Raphael Holy Family they have there—-these two cherubs are really staring up at Mary and the rest, and they only take up the bottom sixth of the very large painting.

Neustadt.

I had a wonderful and memorable evening in Dresden, lying on the banks of the Elbe in the sunset like Anselmus enamoured of the three green snakes (but more on that famous story—perhaps much more—to come). Then I went up and explored Neustadt, which according to my research is where all the hip young Dresdeners live today—a neighborhood which reminded me of Capitol Hill, first Altounstraße (the Pike/Pine corridor) and then Bautzner Straße (15th). I joined the cast of my favorite SIFF film last year, The Edukators, for dinner (couldn’t tell you what we were eating, but it was cheap) at a little garden with a grill and great people-watching, in the Pike/Pine-ish area. (In case you’re wondering, hip German youth look just like hip Amerikanischer Jugend—eccentric jeans, hoodies, and all the kids these days are wearing white belts.) Then I betrayed my revolutionary acquaintances—just like Semper—and went to the charming Café Neustadt on the 15th-ish street, where two girls were playing jazz and eine hübsches Kind served me some unnecessarily strong coffee. I realized the minute I walked in that if I lived in Dresden, that place would be where I’d be found.

Graupa.
But the weirdest—and best—of my Dresden adventures was my voyage to the lame Richard Wagner museum, in the village of Graupa on the outskirts of Dresden. Wagner came to Graupa for a summer holiday in 1846, and apparently wrote much of Lohengrin out there. The museum (formerly in the house where he lived, now in a nearby school) doesn’t have anything especially exciting, except a postcard with a picture of Georg Unger, the first Siegfried in 1876, which I’d never seen.

But the trip out there! It took me an hour, by tram and bus, and would only have been marginally quicker with a car. It was great. I met an old lady from Stuttgard who had grown up in Dresden in the 50s, but who escaped before the wall was built and escape became impossible. She was returning home after many years; her daughter, it turned out, taught Japanese at the University of Washington (although she herself had never been to Seattle). Anyways, the trip went through some charming neighborhoods of Dresden I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, crossed the Elbe, and then went up the hills into wine and farm country and eventually to this adorable village, where even Richard Wagner found it possible to chill out, hunker down, and do some creating. And thank heavens he did!

The Glories of Mass Transit

2006-06-02T16:21:00.000-07:00

It may very well be that Richard Wagner was wrong; the most important activity in human life, I begin to feel, is not creating art, but rather transit—getting from one place to another. Whether you’re destroying your shoes, feet, and legs by walking everywhere, or destroying the planet by using fossil fuels to propel your transportative vehicle, this is the big one—we need to do it (especially we travelers) and we haven’t yet figured out the best way. We have lots of ways to travel! I’ve taken many so far on this very trip, including:

Air Travel. I flew from Seattle to Copenhagen. Obviously, I didn’t do it in a balloon, as in the picture, but rather took a very comfortable SAS flight over northern Canada and Greenland. The ballon was flying over Dresden when I went out for a walk last night, and I just couldn’t resist—I did get to watch the movie Casanova again, while on that very SAS flight, and although in the end I was glad I hadn’t shelled out $25 for a DVD when it first came out (it’ll get cheaper later on) that was an awesome sequence where Heath Ledger takes his girlfriend up for a balloon ride until she figures out he’s really Casanova and they come crashing to the ground and he gets arrested by the Inquisition.

Boats. We took lots of boat rides while in Denmark; another picture, here, of the Scandline ferry, which get you off of Scandanavia and onto the rest of Europe. I think it was a Scandlines boat that Stephen Sprenger and I took from Hoek van Holland to Harwich a couple of years ago, across the North Sea.

Trains. The real glory of traveling in Europe, of course, are the trains, whether S-Bahn (like in the picture, Berlin’s above-ground metro system) or U-Bahn (the underground metro trains, although all of them go above and below ground back and forth) or real train-type-trains, like the ICE which barrels across the countryside at alarming speeds. I love traveling by train, I just love it. So good for people-watching!

Bus. Usually the bus is a second best alternative to the train; certainly in Seattle I resisted participating in our metro system for many years, and finally gave in because I had gotten rid of my car and had no other choice. I’ve had nevery nice adventures here so far, taking buses in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Dresden.

Tram. In Dresden the entire city is criss-crossed by these little tracks, which are something between a train and a bus. In San Francisco they call ‘em ‘light-rail’, and perhaps one day we’ll see such a thing in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath...

Cars. I don’t much care for cars, I’ve discovered over the years. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that the automobile is responsible for what's wrong with America today. I don't know about Germany. The Germans love cars(this picture comes from a weird ‘fancy-car-design-store’ we passed the other night). I’ve really only taken two car rides so far, both taxis to and from the Dresden Train Station, which was too far to walk, even to a bus/tram stop.

Bicycle. By far the most energy-efficient form of transportation yet designed by man, and it works great in most of the cities I’ve been to so far because they’re all flat. This picture is taken in Copenhagen, on Frederiksborggade near where I stayed; you see the commuters heading to work in the morning on their special bike lanes. I only ended up getting a bike out for about an hour so far; it was in Copenhagen, where they have these ‘city bikes’, nasty free bikes theoretically placed all over the city, and (for the refundable deposit of 20 DKK, about $3) you can take one from one rack, ride across town, and replace it in another. I did so Sunday morning, and discovered that this system doesn’t really work, because most of the bikes were stolen when the system was invented ten years ago; I looked 45 minutes to find a working bike, by which time I could have walked to my destination and back. The bike I ended up with was so nasty, by the time I had gotten to Lagehuset and got my Danish, I biked back only as far as the subway station and took the train the rest of the way. Now—if only I’d had my OWN bike!

A Really Weird DREAM

2006-06-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

No, that was a headline from The Onion’s historical archive, something along the lines of:“Martin Luther King: ‘I had a really weird dream last night’, an article in which King rambled on and on about one of those dreams the person feels compelled to tell you about even though it’s all nonsense and you wish they’d shut up. I refer you to my thoughts about Freud, obscurely mentioned in the last blog (somewhere between two parentheses, probably).

No, I must needs write you now a little blog entry “which shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it has no bottom.” I just stepped out of a performance of Ein Sommernachtstraum here at the Deutsches National Theater und Staatskapelle Weimar, which was one of the strangest things ever.

We often tell Americans that every tiny town in Germany has its own opera house, but it’s one thing to repeat that because it’s something you’ve heard the smart set talk about and something else to experience it proper. Weimar is a really small town (a great town, but really small). And this theater is just outrageous! It’s a little Lincoln Center all to itself, with a joint playhouse, opera house, and symphony sharing a couple of performance spaces, every performer and artist a state employee, with a huge bevy of stuff they’re constantly producing. Tonight, this bizarre Traum; tomorrow, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a fabulous opera but one requiring so many performers and such production value we couldn’t afford to do it in Seattle recently; and the day after, Schiller’s Maria Stuarda. Yesterday they sang Rossini’s Otello. Judging from the booklet for next season, it’s like this year-round in this small little town: just the operas scheduled for next year include a “Musical Farce” by Nino Rota, first performed in 1955, called The Florentine Hat (who knew he wrote operas?); Così, co-produced with the sister theater in Braunschweig; The Rocky Horror Show; Die Walküre, out of a Ring they’re doing here next month; Luisa Miller; and a few others. Imagine if this (plus a full bevy of plays and symphony concerts) were being put on in Mt. Vernon all the time. It’s a good-sized theater, probably seats a few less than the Copenhagen Opera, and it wasn’t full tonight. There were lots of kids (every theater and museum I’ve checked out since coming to Germany has been swarming with kids) and nicely-dressed Weimarians, out for a night on the town; I had dinner afterwards with a local high school teacher and her husband, who aren’t exactly subscribers but seem to come to the theater a handful of times each year (with or without students in tow).

Our dinner conversation was a bit strange, since I make mistakes all over the place in German and she was, how do you say, more interested in communicating with me than he was. (Only when you travel in a foreign country do you realize, it’d be a good thing if Americans learned to speak more slowly and clearly, and use simpler words and less irony, when talking to non-native English speakers who have wound up on our shores!) I was okay at the theater because a) I’ve had a few days now to blow the dust off the language where it’s stored up in the attic of my brain, b) I was in Midsummer Night’s Dream years ago, have seen it a thousand times, and know the play more or less by heart, and was chuckling at August Schlegel’s wondrous old translation as much as I was the acting and c) there was plenty of singing, too.

It’s hard for me to tell if this is a new departure for this theater; but this show was a co-production between the two departments of the theater, plays and operas. The performers included a Baroque orchestra, an opera chorus, and 22 soloists—one saxophonist, four opera singers, and the rest actors. It was the Schlegel text of Shakespeare’s play, with some cuts, and then lots of music by Henry Purcell. I note that they’re planning on doing something of this kind again next year, for a Don Quijote show which, the program promises, will draw “from the rich fund of Baroque music, but also from rock and pop,” and which intends to “let the poetic speech of Cervantes give life to a new, unaccustomed form of art.” That kind of describes what happened this evening, as well. Remember that when Richard Wagner ran a theater just like this one, in Dresden in the 1840s (I was there yesterday, I’ll blog about it soon) he got annoyed that opera and theater were considered separate departments and so invented his own kind of weird art form. Just a reminder—you’re on a slippery slope when you start doing this kind of thing!

The music for this Midsummer was drawn from Henry Purcell, mostly (I don’t know what the saxophonist was playing—maybe his own composition). But it wasn’t Purcell’s Fairy Queen, the masque which (as you know) was obstensibly based on Midsummer but didn’t contain a word of Shakespeare in it. I don’t know Purcell well enough to recognize all the sources raided by tonight’s music director (the extremely charismatic Marco Comin); the ones I spotted were “When I am laid in earth”, sung offstage by the narrator figure as Helena is finishing up her “How happy some or other some can be!” monologue, not played at all for laughs with that music beneath it. And, the bass who sang tonight (a wonderful, huge, woofy Hans Hotter-type sound, I’m sorry I didn’t get his name) was a sort of Bottom/Falstaff/Bacchus figure, who appeared shortly before the first Bottom scene and did a Purcell piece I didn’t recognize, in which he was drunk and stuttering and a bunch of fairies were pinching him; and then he reappeared before Bottom’s dream, wearing only underwear, covered in welts from the fairies’ mistreatment of him, and singing the Frost Monster piece from Purcell’s King Arthur. (Ah, what memories that brings back!) Uh...there was one other piece I recognized, although I didn’t take notes at the time and now I’m blanking on it. I think it may have been from the St. Cecilia Mass.

The set, designed by Dirk Becker, was a huge turntable with large, movable white walls and a green projection at the far back. It reminded me plenty of our Macbeth set, except every time there needed to be a scene change the turntable swiveled and we saw some new, non-descript playing space. Idea for a MSND production—it didn’t really happen here, but why not build a forest floor piece, a sort of big carpet, with blankets of the same material hidden to the eye because they blend in. That way, when everybody goes to sleep on what otherwise always looks like a bare stage floor, they could pull blankets up over them and it would look as if they were wrapping themselves in the forest?

I’ll stop trying to design another production and tell you a little about this one instead. It’s a weird temptation, though, because honestly I adore this play, know it like the back of my hand and adore every word of it, but I don’t feel so strongly about how IT SHOULD BE DONE. I’ve never really thought about what I would do in “my production”, for instance (as I have with, say, the Ring). I think there’s absolutely no one right way to do Midsummer, and love it that it’s so darn ambiguous, that it works so well in so many different approaches. A few specifics about this approach to the characters:

The Narrator. The show opened with a decent Baroque singer (I wouldn’t hire her for my opera house, but she was fine for this production) who seemed to be a narrator of some kind, singing Purcell with a thick German accent. Oberon and Titania entered on either side of her, and Titania started making love to the narrator—clearly in order to make Oberon jealous, but perhaps it was inspired by the fact that they cut Titania’s great speech about the changeling boy’s mother.
Titania. The woman playing Titania, Rosemarie Deibel, had a voice that reminded me incredibly of Judy Dench’s. (She was a bit taller than Dame J.) I’m guessing she was a big German actress who’s been around for decades, and there was a certain school of vocal production in the 70s that must have encouraged that husky, Glynis Johns kind of sound.
Oberon. The very attractive Jürg Wisbach played Oberon, with tight white pants and a big white cape/coat, made (I think) out of leather and fur. He was clearly in love with Titania; we didn’t see hide nor hair of the changeling, and when Puck first appeared with the flower, Puck had obviously tried it out to see if it worked because he/she (Puck was androgynous) immediately began making love to Oberon. Luckily for him, Oberon had a little of the antidote juice ready to go, squeezed it on Puck’s eyes, and Puck let him alone and they continued their scene. (At the top of the second act—located about where Britten starts his third act—Oberon got a moment to caress the narrator respectfully.)
Puck. Claudia Meyer played Puck, with a bald skull-cap and roller-skates, most of his/her lines given through a microphone and distorted. Much of the more sing-songey stuff was in English (with a thick German accent), although when he/she was having conversations it was in German. The roller-skates gave a singing-acting-DANCING quality to the whole production.
Theseus and Hippolyta. Renée Listerdal’s costumes for the court of Athens were black and white and pseudo-Renaissance, often with wild collars. I’d spent much of the afternoon today looking at old Dutch Masters at the Dresden Alte Galerie, and so recognized the style. In this production Theseus and Hippolyta don’t have much to do (Theseus seemed a jolly Bavarian wurst-and-bier kind of guy; Hippolyta, who had two zappy red wigs, a different one in Act 5, was a little busier than normal).
Egeus. Hermia’s father enters dragging her by a rope, which is tied around her hands and a white gag around her mouth. Theseus removes the gag so she can say her first line; but it’s all a good shorthand way of letting us know what goes out at the Egeus household.
Hermia. This Hermia was very into martial arts and physical combat. I think she took her cue from Helena’s line ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’. It occurs to me that Midsummer Night’s Dream is basically Hermia’s story, the way Lord of the Rings is more or less about Frodo. Maybe that’s why these characters are so hard to approach.
Lysander. This Lysander did a ridiculous strip-tease in the forest as he was going to bed with Hermia for the first time. The defining moment for him is when Hermia won’t have sex with him that night, so he decides he doesn’t love her and loves Helena instead. In fact, you get the sense that of the four of them, Lysander is the biggest turd.
Demetrius. The defining moment for Demetrius comes when he tells Egeus he’s changed and no longer wants his daughter, the morning after the dream. That’s when he stands up and, by switching his desire, resolves the conflict of the whole show. I should point out that this Lysander and Demetrius at one point were so enamoured of Helena they both jumped her; the three of them struggled around for a bit, then Helena crawled away to look back and see Lysander and Demetrius continuing to kiss and roll around passionately. Eventually, they sat up, milked a few double-takes for all the laughs they could possibly scare up, and got on with things.
Helena. To me, Helena is usually the heart of the show—the most grotesque, but most human character in the piece, the only one who actually gets a big monologue about what this lunatic love is all about. And there’s something automatically funny, if a little sad, about her. The Helena tonight wasn’t especially played for laughs.
Quince. I played Peter Quince a thousand years ago in a production of Midsummer, and I kind of love the part—he’s the one who’s so literal-minded and slow he thinks they need to have actors come in to play the Wall and the Moon, or else the spectators might not get it that those things exist in the world of Pyramus and Thisbe. Tonight we had a female Petra Skranz, who seemed a parody of the current German head of state. I also got the sense that she had a thing for bottom.
Bottom. For some reason Schlegel called Bottom “Zettel”. The fellow who did the role tonight, Aleksandar Tesla, was incredible—a dancer’s body, so he was completely expressive (not to mention beautiful) even with a big ass’s head on. The other four mechanicals were a sort-of barbershop quartet, and the six of them had worked the timing and the stylization out in each of their scenes brilliantly and beautifully—I wasn’t sure I was going to laugh at the Pyramus and Thisbe scene without Shakespeare’s silly English text, but they were so funny (and Schlegel did such a good job—where Shakespeare has Bottom say “O night, O night! alack, alack, alack” Schelgel manages to improve on it in German with “O Nacht! O Nacht! O ach! ach! acht!”) I ran out of breath from laughing so hard.

Richard Wagner saw Midsummer Night’s Dream in his apprentice years in the theater, in this same translation, the first time it was ever staged (by Devrient, I think? Somebody want to look this up?) with Mendelssohn’s incidental music. I know it made a big impression on him, because before long he was putting together Meistersinger, which is another great, big, glorious, weird, unfathomable, deliriously wonderful DREAM.

Berlin: Land of Museums, Churches and Theaters

2006-06-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

I’m happy to report that after several nice days full of Berlin adventures, the city has stopped making me nervous. And I think a lot of that has to do with the language slowly coming back to life in my brain—I noticed the other night, after going to the theater and hearing a play in German, I was thinking in German again, something I haven’t done in lo these many years. It probably has something to do with so much of my Wagner agenda for this trip clicking into place, now that I’m here in Germany. And more than that, it probably has to do with Berlin being one of the world’s greatest cities, and a joy for anyone to explore.

Where to begin? Tough question, because it’s vast. Berlin’s incredible size reminds me only of New York and London, among sprawling cities we’re I’ve walked my feet to pulp. (Berlin has in fact a great mass transit system; more on that later.) I’ll begin where the last blog left off—I posted a photo I took of the Berliner Dom at night, seen from the fountain, the big cathedral on the main drag, Unter den Linden. It was made by Kaiser Wilhelm I in the 1890s, and is in that bric-brac fin de siècle (what you’d call in Yiddish onge patchket) allied with a massive Teutonic monumentalism. Thus, the organ features more than 7000 pipes:

And to reach the top of the Dom you climb forever and ever. But you get a nice view up there, assuming it’s a decent day; the Dom is on Museum Insel, a small island in the River Spree which is covered in museums and monuments. From the dome, to the north and a smidgen east, in the center of this photo, the gold hemisphere you see is the dome of the main Berlin synagogue:

And, closer up, that synagogue may be worth a visit if you get particularly interested in the Berlin Jewish community. I was, and here’s the story: the synagogue was built in the mid-19th century as Berlin became a magnet for Jews from all over Germany and eastern Europe. It held services up to 1943, at which point the Nazis took it over completely; and it was largely destroyed by the bombing before the end of the war. But so were most of the Jews in Berlin, and only a few stayed after 1945, so it wasn’t until the 80s that they started dealing with the synagogue. They’ve reconstructed the front façade on Oranienburger Str., with the beautiful dome:

But behind, where the synagogue proper used to be, is just an open field. (There’s a mediocre museum with some stuff saved from the rubble beneath the dome.) So it’s not necessarily worth the trip. (The Schwules Museum also turned out to be a big bust. Oh—poor choice of words, that.) If you’re interested in the Berlin Jewish Community—or even if you’re not—you really ought to go to the striking Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which is a ways south of Museum Insel. I got there by walking down a little alley named for one of my all-time favorite authors:

Bet you didn’t know Hoffmann was all those things listed on the sign (Dichter, Komponist, Maler und Kammergerichtsrat). Well, it’s true. Anyway, the Jüdisches Museum opened in 2001; it was designed by Daniel Liebeskind, who built a truly bizarre space. See the photo below. The large building to the right houses the main permanent exhibit and also the space for temporary exhibits; but there’s no doors in that building (of course I had to discover this fact the hard way, walking all around the block in the pouring rain!). You enter through a much more traditional building next door, go downstairs, and find yourself in three long intersecting hallways laid out something like a letter ‘A’ if the middle line kept going on either side. One Axis takes you to the main building; a second, the Axis of the Holocaust, takes you past memorabilia of Holocaust victims to the big white blur in the middle of the photo—that’s an empty concrete tower, a memorial to those murdered in the Holocaust, and at the end of that axis you can (if you choose) enter the bottom of the tower, which is a cold, dark space, reminiscent of prison or death—with one glimpse of light, way high above, dazzling even when it’s raining out. The third line of the ‘A’ is the Axis of Exile, with memorabilia of Jews who lost their homes in recent diasporas; it leads to the ‘Garden of Exile’ a sort of chess board with 48 concrete pillars (you see the tops of the pillars poking above the ground in the center of the picture, with willows growing from them) standing for the year 1948, when Israel was formed. Wandering through this pillared space is disorienting, as is being exiled; although I did notice some kids having fun hiding behind the columns and surprising one another while I was in there.

Speaking of kids and exile, along the Axis of Exile I had to grab a photo of this reproduction: an 11-year old boy’s family left Germany for Uruguay in the 1930s, and he kept this record of his journey “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat” (from the old homeland to the new homeland) on his trip, with every form of transportation they used at the top and a vague map of their route below: an early trip blog!

The permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin is about Jewish life in Germany from the Dark Ages up to the rise of National Socialism. (The more recent stuff is well-covered by many other institutions! Among them are the Deutsches Historisches Museum, whose current exhibition on German poster art/advertising over the last 130 years follows this story—and is well worth a gander.) The special exhibition at the Jewish Museum, yesterday, was a “Happy 150th Birthday, Siegmund Freud” suite, complete with an enormous, room-sized birthday cake upon which puppets acted out every chapter of Freud’s biography, from the scene where the young Ziggy (the puppet for the little boy already had a beard and big round “Where’s Waldo” glasses) stumbles upon his mother naked to the hypnotism of Anna O and her dream:

I gotta say, I loved this cake—and I didn’t even get to eat a slice. (Nor am I much of a Freud fan.) It reminded me of something I once tried to do in a Seattle Opera Parsifal publication, a timeline of Richard Wagner’s life in the style of a boardgame, ie “Help Richard find his way to the Temple of the Holy Grail!” See, kids? Who’d have thought learning could be so much fun?

I was reminded of Wagner in the Jewish Museum particularly on the Axis of Exile, since Wagner’s life is all about exile—he was a German, and for most of his life there wasn’t a Germany, and even so for the most productive years of his life, due to his political activities, he was exiled from what Germany there was.

We saw more about exile this morning at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a very grass-roots museum about the Berlin Wall, and the separation of East and West Berlin and East and West Germany, and nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. This experience I also recommend highly—it’s a story I thought I knew, but I didn’t know the half of it, the bizarre, dangerous, and ingenious ways people from the east invented to escape to the west and the well-documented ethical conundrum experienced by the soldiers who worked the wall, who were told ‘shoot to kill’ any time someone tried to escape, but who (like Vader’s stormtroopers) most of the time seemed to have terrible aim. As an American, the experience of the divided Germany reminds me of our Civil War—a house divided against itself cannot stand and all that—but of course it’s the opposite experience because no one in Germany WANTED to be divided in two. The scars of the American Civil War are still healing, and I’m sure the same will be true a hundred years from now in Germany. On the other hand, there are plenty of teenagers (swarming every museum and theater I’ve been to since I got here), some of whom now were born AFTER the wall fell. What do they think of it? What would RW have thought of it? Oy vey!

A few other Wagner-related experiences I’ve had these last couple of days, and then I’ll end this post. The problem is, since Wagner basically engorged the entire world and made it strangely his, it’s possible for everything in life to relate to Wagner. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. This afternoon I managed to spend a little time at the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin Gemäldegalerie (Painting Gallery) studying the current exhibition on “Albrecht Dürers Mutter”. This exhibition centers on a drawing the great Renaissance woodcut and sketch artist and painter Dürer did of his mother shortly before she died (right); it’s a wonderfully thorough exhibition which gathers hundreds of images of old women, old men, beauty, ugliness, and death from Dürer’s time. He is far and away the greatest artist of them all, and it’s his incredible humanity and love for his mother which still shines brightly from this drawing. The Wagner connection, of course, is the prominent mention of Dürer in Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s greatest opera and his love letter to “Heilige Deutsche Kunst”, Holy German Art.

Meistersinger is his most accessible opera, despite its ridiculous length, because the music sounds like Bach and the story is like a Shakespeare comedy. With that in mind, I visited two theaters these last two days: this evening, the Berliner Philharmoniker Kammermusiksaal, the smaller of the two Berlin Phil rooms (it seats 1500, in the round) to hear the Berliner Figuralchor and Berlin Baroque, under the fingers (no baton) of the not-very-charismatic Gerhard Oppelt and a quartet of soloists, doing the Bach B-Minor Mass. What a piece! The closest Bach ever came to writing an opera, I’ve always asserted. The Berliner Baroque is a small ensemble reminiscent of Seattle Baroque (and where are THEY now?) who play on period instruments—for this mass, we had three old-timey violins with weird bows, two old-timey flutes that sound kind of like recorders, three wonderful old-timey oboes, a valveless horn (amazing work from that guy, who had to do it all with his lips and his hand in the bell), three trumpets, continuo of cello, lute, and organ, and old-timey timani which seem to be even harder to keep in tune than modern timpani. The singers weren’t really opera singers, but rather the kind of people who specialize in lieder or concerts with orchestra. The countertenor who sang the alto part, Alex Potter, was pretty good. Anyways, it was great to be there, and to hear this piece I’ve always loved. And which reminds me of Meistersinger.

I checked the schedules at Berlin’s three opera companies this week, but there wasn’t anything I HAD to hear and frankly, after last week, I figured I could take a break from opera. So I went instead to the theater; to Vaganten Bühne, near where I’m staying at Savingy Platz, to see a play I know extremely well in English: Shakespeares Sämtliche Werke (Leicht Gekürzt) (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—Abridged). If you don’t already know this riotous farce, think “Jon ‘n’ Perry get a bunch of high school kids to act out the Complete Works of Richard Wagner in a half an hour” and you’ve got the right idea—infotainment, even more so than that Freud Birthday Cake. I was surprised and pleased to see that the translator, Dorothea Renckhoff, has taken a few liberties with the immortal words of Messrs. Long, Singer, and Winfield: the Troilus and Cressida gag is gone, the Macbeth section expanded to feature Lady M, and the biography of Shakespeare gag altered for obvious reasons. (In the English version, the very confused actor reading Shakespeare’s bio from a bunch of index cards ends up saying things like “Shakespeare annexed the Sudetenland and the invaded Poland; in 1945 he committed suicide with his mistress, Eva Braun” but in Germany he moved to Weimar, lived opposite Goethe, and penned the immortal words of the “Ode to Joy” instead, as did Schiller.) Since Wagner idolized Shakespeare, wanted to be the next Shakespeare (far more than he ever wanted to be a composer), and spent much of his childhood and young adulthood working for low-budget theater companies like the one which presented this masterpiece tonight, I felt it highly incumbent upon me to attend—after all, as you know, I SEEK RICHARD!

First Impressions of Berlin

2006-05-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

The journey down from Copenhagen: I’ve never before been on a train that then got onto a ferry, although I’ve heard of such things. They used to have one in Northern Michigan, connecting the two peninsulas, before a) they built the Mackinaw Bridge and b) trains became so monstrously declassé in the midwest. I mean, honestly, who takes a train these days? Gas is so much cheaper! Anyways, in this picture you can see how the train was loaded onto the car deck of the ferry:

I didn’t understand, when I bought the train ticket, that this would be the case; but I was overjoyed to get to ride a boat as well as a train. We sailed from Rodby Havn, Denmark, to Puttgarden, Germany, across the strait that separates the Kieler Bay (which, in the west, washes the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, the disputed German/Denmark land border) from the Mecklenburger Bay (which gives onto the Baltic Sea). Both bays are vast, and you can’t see to the other end. The boat was vast, too (only a member of the Runions family could tell me the specific dimensions):

From Puttgarden the train went on to Hamburg and then I transferred to the ICE, the inter-city express, which whisked me off to Berlin at some alarming speed and was a remarkably smooth and pleasant ride. Now, this is my first ever trip to Berlin. I find it a little strange that I’ve waited until I’m this old to get here; I started studying the language on my own back in 1990, first came to Germany in 1996, and have been working closely with German operas all this time—but for whatever reason I haven’t spent a whole lot of time travelling here. There is a reason; it’s hard to put into words, but I’ll try. I noticed yesterday, when I got here, I was a little nervous. I’m guessing I’ll grow more comfortable being in Germany over the course of the next week; but at first, it was tough for me to relax and be at ease. An unusual experience, not one I’ve often had travelling (except when visiting certain parts of the Midwest!) Richard Wagner, who spent most of his life on the run, certainly had this kind of experience all the time. You can hear it in his music, here was a man who was never comfortable in his own skin. And there’s something about his country—this vast, dense, incredibly complicated place—which confuses me as well.

The following picture may help give you a little sense of what’s confusing about Berlin:

That’s the steeple of Mary’s Church flush with the Television Tower, not far from Alexanderplatz. And that’s the first thing you notice about Berlin, as a visitor: you’re conscious of the past, all the rich history of this part of the world; and all the energy of the people is currently directed toward the future; and where, pray tell, is the present? There’s an elephant on the table, it can be tough to see in the city but everyone at all times must be conscious of it—the gap between past and future, that immediate past in which the city was obliterated. It’s weird, this is the first time I’ve ever been to a big European city which reminds me of an American city—big wide streets, lots of cars everywhere, everything spread out, parking lots. The reason is not because the Germans like cars so much; it’s because most of this city, like most American cities, dates from after 1945. (To be fair, much of the City of London was also obliterated during the war, and it’s tough to get a sense of the history from simply wandering about there as well.)

The other reason I’m nervous, I’m sure, is because my ability to speak what Mark Twain once called "the awful German language" has grown quite weak—the last time I wrote a translation of a German opera was a couple of years ago (Ariadne or Lohengrin, I don’t remember which I wrote first) and this is a city and a country with the deepest respect for the German language, as this sculpture outside Humboldt Universität attests:

So yeah, we’ll see how we do with that! Two more examples of this Germany past/future kind of thing from last night’s brisk tour of the city: I stopped for some food in the Noodle Cafe, a Wagamama-style restaurant with tasty Asian-fusion cuisine. The flirty waiter mistook me for a food critic, with my notepad and nosy questions about the place, an error I was keen to exploit since it meant I got to try more of the really interesting menu.

This Noodle Café is situated in the Radisson SAS hotel on Unter den Linden, near the Deutsche Staatsoper, and upstairs there’s another pan-fusion restaurant, hEAT, which looked plenty interesting as well—world cuisine, each region’s food prepared as would be traditional in that region instead of the jumble we sometimes get in our multicultural fast-food restaurants. The Radisson itself is absurd, with a central atrium built around an enormous fish tank. The lighting wasn’t great but this picture gives you an idea: that’s a vast aquarium above the check-in desks, and from each of the rooms on each of the levels you can gaze across to see what the fish are up to:

Outside the Radisson you cross the river Spree, and, on the other side, step into the past: the Berlin Dom, the main cathedral, which houses lots of random musical and cultural events, and obviously belongs architecturally to the pre-war Germany, instead of the Radisson’s futurism.

So I’m off now to the new Deutsches Historik Museum to try even harder to wrap my brain around the weirdness which is this great country.

The End of All Things

2006-05-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

‘Well, I’m back,’ he said. We made it. Copenhagen produced its first Ring in almost a century. And we were there for the final performances; no one will ever see that particular Ring ever again, since they’re planning on trashing the production and never remounting it. (The dramaturg tells me that since Wagner said, “Kinder, schafft neues” (Children, make something new) every time the Ring is produced it ought to be different; and thus, if Denmark’s Kongelige Teater ever does another Ring they’ll do everything differently next time. I don’t think they have any immediate plans to do it at all; my next Ring will be the first-ever Canadian Ring, in Toronto next September. (Maybe I’ll even blog it, if there’s popular demand.)

Ragnarok, as the Danes call the final opera, is quite a show. It’s my favorite of the four operas, because I feel it has the most stuff in it, as well as the most sophisticated music. Tonight’s production, like the rest of this particular Ring, was full of interesting stuff but far from definitive.

The first line of Götterdämmerung is sung by the First Norn: “Welch Licht leuchtet dort?” (What light is that?) It was fun, in the Copenhagen production, when she was sitting in the first row of the audience, stood up, tapped the conductor on the shoulder, and pointed to the maestro special light hanging from beneath the boxes. Fun—but really, kind of a waste, I take this moment as indicative of the basic issue I’m having with this Ring (and which I suspect I’d be likely to have with many others: EFFECTS WITHOUT CAUSES. The phrase is Wagner’s, complaining about the Meyerbeer operas which were so much more popular than his, while he lived, and which are all but forgotten today. Splashy, superficial effects, zappy and fun though they may be—such as having the First Norn break down the 4th wall of theater, implicating the audience in the show—do not, in the end, an evening in the theater make. Or rather, they do, but we’ve witnessed a string of unrelated vaudeville acts jumbled together, not a great story thoughtfully told. Which—maybe I should have said this first thing—is what I want from a night in the theater.

The effect of that “Welch Licht leuchtet dort” moment is powerful. It acknowledges to the audience that we are there, that it is all about our experience—that we’re not watching a movie. It’s like when the storyteller looks you in the eyes, when the Ancient Mariner fixes you, o Wedding Guest, with his glittering eye. But the story-teller is supposed to be telling a story—there should be a cause behind the effect.

In fact, that line inquiring about the light is a great story-telling place to start; it relates to the basic theme of the opera, to the opera’s title. Götterdämmerung, usually rendered in English Twilight of the Gods, is even better translated as God’s Gloaming, because the German word Dämmerung applies to both dawn and dusk—that time of mixed light, one going and one coming. The title of this opera doesn’t tell us which it is. Neither does the ambiguous ending of the story—was this a defeat or a triumph? What light is that? The answer, several lines later in the Norn scene, turns out to be ‘Loge’—the most ambiguous figure in the whole Ring, the fire that serves and rebels, that protects and harms, Wagner’s greatest symbol of the modern age—a figure for technology, science, industry, skepticism, cynicism. What light is that? What is that light? It’s so much a part of the very fabric of our lives, today, everything most of us do, all day long, the Norn’s line is a great and very important question. Wagner gave us, in this moment, a worthy cause. So why can’t the effect stem from that source instead of this arbitrary conceit of the director?

That said, there was actually much I liked about yesterday’s Götterdämmerung. The only thing I absolutely hated was the voice of the Hagen, who was about as great a singer as I am. (After the show I told Speight: “This performance makes hope blaze brightly in my bosom! As you know, it’s been my lifetime dream to sing Hagen, and if they hired that guy maybe someone will hire me!”) Just as Rheingold stands or falls by its Loge, so a Götterdämmerung sits on a tripod of Siegfried (Stig Anderson, wonderful), Brünnhilde (Tina Kiborg, less so) and Hagen (yesterday it was basically an actor who occasionally tried to hit a few notes). And since Hagen controls the plot—he’s the Iago, the cunning mastermind manipulator who plays all the other characters like puppets—it’s a serious thing when he gives an incomplete performance because he can’t sing. One of the things I love about going to hear Götterdämmerung is the sound of a big, rich, dark, supremely evil bass voice, in scenes like the Watch Song or the Summoning of the Vassals, and in unforgettable lines like: “Hoiho! Wohin, du heitrer Held?” or “Heil, Siegfried! Theuer Held.” or “Meines Speeres Spitze wag’ ich daran: sie wahr’ in Ehren den Eid.” or “Meineid rächt’ ich!” When you don’t really hear or enjoy those, it’s only a partial Götterdämmerung, says I.

I’m also sorry to say that despite the intentions of director and dramaturg, there really is no concept to this Ring. They called it “Brünnhilde’s Ring” in their publications on the subject; we’d taken to calling it the feminist or matriarchal Ring because of the way it was pitched initially, which implied that their point was: men are unfit to rule the world and run things because their narcissistic, aggressive, short-sighted ways make a mess of everything; and furthermore, in the new world order of the new millenium, it’s the girls (the made-wise-by-experience Brünnhilde, for example) who will be doing a better job of running things. All I can say is: maybe so. But a) I’m not sure that’s what the Ring is about; sounds to me like a case of square peg and round hole, an artistic team who want to say what they have to say regardless of what the piece is about; and b) if that in fact is what they were trying to say, they did a poor job of saying it!

The only ‘feminist’ or ‘strong woman’ features of this Götterdämmerung, that I recall, include Brünnhilde coming in with a gun when Hagen tries to take the ring, after he’s killed Gunther. Ordinarily Siegfried’s dead hand rises up at this point, greeting Brünnhilde’s entrance as per the prophetic words with which he died. (It may be this is not one of Wagner’s strongest moments; it’s often perplexed stage directors, since it seems an example of a Wagnerian effect with no cause, or at least a dubious one. The other example of this kind of thing would be the Norns’ rope breaking, to end the first scene.) Our director in Copenhagen had Hagen shoot Gunther, advance towards the dead Siegfried with his gun, and Brünnhilde enter from the other side of the dead Siegfried, her own gun pointed at Hagen. Hagen makes a little gesture of “Uh-oh! She’s got a gun,” and for some reason he drops his on a nearby couch and slinks away so she can sing her immolation scene. It didn’t make any sense to me—as a plot point, it wasn’t even the story of Brünnhilde’s weapon being more powerful than Hagen’s. (Which, had that been the story they were trying to tell, could hardly be considered productively feminist!)

The other ‘strong woman’ moment comes a few lines later, when Brünnhilde forgives Gutrune and the two share a warm embrace. (See picture.) Whatever. Wagner leaves Gutrune’s fate ambiguous; directors who hate such loose ends always feel a need to finish her story. Since the world is about to be destroyed, it’s never mattered much to me what happens to her. I wasn’t sure, in this production, this Gutrune was deserving of forgiveness...she was a pretty bad lot.

I want to describe some of the things I liked about the Copenhagen Götterdämmerung. (Sorry to be so crabby thus far!) I loved such elements as:

Light-hearted Norn Scene. I know many who found it sacreligious, but something about the fun this production had in the Norn scene appealed to me. This scene contains some of the greatest music Wagner ever wrote, but typically it’s hard to make it interesting or dangerous in performance, since there’s something undramatic about watching three old biddies gossip and spin threads and tales for twenty minutes. And it’s only great music if you understand the text; without the words, I doubt it makes a heck of a lot of sense. As I mentioned, the Norns were in the audience for their first three speeches (Wotan’s past, present, and future); they appear onstage for their second round of speeches (Loge’s past, present, and future) and their triple rejoinders about Alberich—then, when they sing “Es ris! Es ris! Es ris!” (where the web of fate traditionally breaks, for obscure reasons) the curtain goes up to reveal the set for the next scene. The staging didn’t have much to do with the specifics of the stories they were telling—but it was engaging and structurally interesting.

Houseplants chez Brünnhilde. After a week of complaining, in this blog, about the ugly Valkyrie Rock with its artificial forms of manufacture, I was pleased to see that somebody must have been reading me—in the first act, that set was now a greenhouse, with plants all over the little room where Siegfried and Brünnhilde have been living. That’s all I wanted...natural shapes, the chaos and proliferation of a vine hanging from the walls and ceiling, tails of white flowers hanging from it like fuschia, and lots more plants everywhere else. Makes me want to go live in a jungle!

Stig and Tina. Setting the voices aside for a moment, Stig Anderson and Tina Kiborg make far and away the strongest VISUAL Siegfried and Brünnhilde I’ve ever seen. They’re both impassioned actors, warmly giving of themselves onstage; they both hurl themselves into these roles; they’re both beautiful, and (being Danish) look kind of like you think Siegfried and Brünnhilde probably looked; and, being husband and wife, there’s a terrific chemistry between them which they bring onto the stage. Now, I’ve already noted that I don’t think Kiborg really has the appropriate Brünnhilde voice. Anderson, on the other hand, sang it very well—perhaps not the best I’ve ever heard, but beautiful, nuanced, interesting, and (except in the parts that no one can sing) accurate.

Gunther as Modern Warlord. As this Ring kept advancing through the twentieth century, we end with Götterdämmerung set in the late 90’s or maybe 2000, with (Guido Paevatalu as) King Gunther of the Gibichungs seen as leader of a private army, possibly in the war-ridden Balkans. He might have ruled someplace in the mideast, or Africa, but the cityscape looked sort of European. Anyways, the characterization was great—his degeneracy and basic uselessness reminded me of plenty of spoiled Eastern Europeans I have known.

Psycho Hagen. I thought this Hagen was a non-singing actor because he acted the part so well. We first saw him in Siegfried Act Two, where he’s made up to look like a college boy; in this opera he’s older, an albino-mole person like his father and uncle (since Nibelungs live underground?) who resembles Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (and at the same time Principal Seymour Skinner, if he were a real person). He has an obsession with shooting and killing people, which we noticed in Siegfried Act Two as he was constantly pointing his fingers like a gun at his father, or at Siegfried, to indicate how he wished to shoot them. In addition to stabbing Siegfried with his bayonet and shooting Gunther (both of whom Wagner asks him to murder), Hagen stabs Alberich in the belly with a pocket-knife (Alberich continues to sing, “Sei treu, treu...treu” after the fact, which made the moment of stabbing seem kind of arbitrary), murders a bunch of prisoners captured by Gunther’s army, and finally exits the stage (after “Züruck vom Ring!”) with his right arm on fire—remember, his father lost his right arm—after reaching into the flaming Valhalla library trying to retrieve the ring. Peter Kazaras, you’re not the only one whose arm can light up in Götterdämmerung!

Scuzbucket Gutrune. I liked Yiva Kihlberg, who played Gutrune as a trashy sexpot, engaged at their first entrance in an amorous scene with her brother. While I’ve often speculated on just what the real deal is with those Gibichungs, and I think it’s possible that the thought crossed Wagner’s mind that Gunther and Gutrune were up to something, I can report—now having seen it—that it really doesn’t add anything to the show. Unless you kept returning to the idea, in scene after scene, you quickly forget about their incest after Siegfried arrives. So what’s the point of playing it up? It only makes unsympathetic characters even more repulsive.

Drink as drugs. The magic potion can be a tough plot point, in Götterdämmerung, but I honestly think it’s great. It makes perfect sense, in a production like this one, where they give him lots and lots of alcohol, laced with some unindentified drug, and Siegfried immediately becomes a different person—as people do who are addicted to drugs.

The reverse Rhine journey. The orchestra played the reverse Rhine journey very nicely, I’m happy to report. I was dreading it, ‘cause usually it’s a very dull piece indeed—all about Hagen’s inner emptiness and Brünnhilde’s loneliness, which she can’t understand. But I think it was their best playing of the evening.

Waltraute. Again, we were all surprised and delighted by Annette Bud, the really great Waltraute. There wasn’t anything unusual about the staging of her scene, but she did a fine job of singing and acting it—and that’s not always the case.

Real Vassals. The nice thing about a contemporary, updated production is that it forces everyone to think of the characters are real people. Sometimes, when they look really far out, you go into a weird mental state where you know you’re supposed to be suspending disbelief, but you aren’t, really; yet you think you are. When the Gibichung Vassals come out dressed in outrageous quasi-medieval costumes, and stand in semi-circles like your standard nineteenth-century opera chorus, it’s easy for the audience to stop living the show as drama. In this case, with them Slobodan Milosevic’s private army of terrorist thugs, they were all too real to all of us.

Staging of Act Two Quintet. You’re probably thinking “Wait, there’s no quintet, there’s a trio! The man must be mad!” And no, the trio was no good at all (none of them were good singers, which you need if you’re going to do that piece). I’m talking about one of the hardest scenes in all drama to stage sensibly, the five-person pentagle earlier in the second act, the double wedding of Brünnhilde, Gunther, Gutrune, and Siegfried, assisted by Hagen. Only once before have I seen that scene make any sense at all, in terms of the drama—who knows what, who’s thinking what, and who wants what from who. It’s very obscure in the text, probably on purpose, but always a danger spot in the theater—here negotiated with great success.

Old Rhinedaughters. Siegfried dreams of the Rhinedaughters at the top of Act Three. (Don’t ask me why it was a dream. Makes no difference to the plot one way or the other.) They, at first, are still wearing their 1920s costumes and wigs, but when they dive under the Rhine and resurface they now look like hideous old hags—much like how the Norns usually look. I thought this was fascinating, although what bearing it has on a matriarchal/feminist interpretation is beyond me.

Death of Siegfried. Stig Anderson’s rendering of the death scene, with the narration before it and the vision after he’s stabbed—sung, in this case, directly to Brünnhilde, was musically the climax of the week.

Singing “Ruhe” to Wotan #4. This director annoyed me many times by bringing on characters who aren’t supposed to be in those scenes and not giving them anything significant to do; two exceptions are the appearance of Brünnhilde in Siegfried’s death scene just mentioned, and the appearance of Wotan during the Immolation—a Wotan double (that’s the fourth Wotan we’ve seen this week! I’m going crazy!), looking very old, sitting in a chair and facing upstage, interacts with Brünnhilde during the part of the Immolation where she’s addressing him. A very nice idea.

Video Projections. In the final act we had a huge screen illuminated by rear projectors at the back of the stage; twice a phalanx of airplanes flew toward us from the distance and soared over Brünnhilde’s head; and then, when she set everything on fire, we saw a fire burning on the screen. Okay...so the use of projection in this case was a little basic. But I think it offers lots of possibilities for future Ring directors...think, guys, think...

Baby. Brünnhilde was pregnant all through Götterdämmerung, and runs offstage after “Selig grüß dich dein Weib!” to have her baby—she then returns, holding it, for the final motif, which refers to her self-sacrificial love. John Nesholm had predicted this before we even arrived at the theater, and when he said it, I remember saying: “Oh, please, no, what a cliché, how obvious.” Yes; and yet, when I saw it, and heard that music, I had a little emotional moment. It’s probably the old theater adage—nothing is as guaranteed irresistible as a baby (so don’t share the stage with them!). A physical reaction kicks in, and we all go: Aww... Which is perfect for that music. So, yes, it was cheap—but effective. In this case, an effect with a cause so deep that I’ll allow it. Just don’t anybody else try it!

Miscellaneous Copenhagen Adventures

2006-05-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

I only have one day left in Copenhagen, so I thought I’d briefly report on some of the other fun things we’ve seen. The statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid in Copenhagen’s main canal is amazingly lame. An endless stream of busses full of Japanese tourists washes by this little spot, a little north of the lovely Amalienborg (where the Danish royal family live today). I went there because Juraj insisted, having always had a thing for this particular story. (If you only know the story from the Disney version, you should know that Hans Christian Anderson, who languished in unrequited love most of his life, wrote a very different ending to his version. And in the Czech opera Rusalka by Dvořak, which we were producing when I first met my friend Juraj, who’s from Slovakia, she refuses to kill the prince and thus forfeits her voice to the wicked witch and becomes a will-o’-the-wisp, a wraith luring men to their death in swamps for the rest of time; the foreign princess rejects the prince, whereupon he goes crazy and comes reeling into the forest looking for the little mermaid; and when he finds her, she’s a wraith and kisses him with lips of ice. He dies, and she lives forever after as this horrible undead wraith-vampire creature. Stupid Disney always tries to make everything so happy!)

In any event, unless you’re a tool you should skip the Little Mermaid statue adventure on your visit to Copenhagen. The statue goes back about a hundred years, during which time it’s been decapitated twice and defaced several times, probably by tourists disappointed after all the hype. Here’s a photo of the statue, looking across the canal at a sailboat and the windmills on the far shore (Denmark, being a typically Green Scandinavian country, is covered in windmills):

A far more interesting statue, south of the Little Mermaid near Churchill Plads, memorializes the myth of Gefion, retold in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (one of the principal sources of the old Norse myths which inspired Wagner’s stories for the Ring). The island of Zealand, where I’ve spent the last week, was created when a giantess named Gefion, assisted by a team of very large bulls, dragged some land that had been part of Sweden across the sea. This statue is one of those cool ‘fountain’ statues, which has water coming out of it in various spots—including the nostrils of the steaming bulls, which makes for a really neat effect.

In addition to scouring the city looking at statues, we’ve done more than a little inspection of the state of design in contemporary Denmark. Back home in the US, of course, we mostly think of Danishes as tasty pastries and the country of Denmark in connection with furniture (although the cafe at IKEA down in Renton, Washington serves Swedish meatballs and lutefisk, not Danish food). Sure enough, Denmark is the land of design. Stores upon stores showcase the latest and greatest in Danish design for any product you can think of. It reminds me of Professor Tolkien’s elves: making art out of the most ordinary elements of everyday life, like toilets, instead of our American project of making the most sacred elements of life (food, sex, communication) into the mundane. Here’s a photo from the lovely Copenhagen Kunst Industri Museum, the Museum of Danish Design. This piece is silver, folded into ocean waves and then beaten with a hammer to give it texture, and with a little golden ship sailing on the sea:

The bulk of the Kunstindustrimuseum (which I highly recommend) is a historical survey of design trends in Denmark and the world, including a thorough history of 20th century Danish design, as well as rooms devoted to many of the earlier trends which still influence our design today. Mary, of course, gravitated to the 1960s room, and got several ideas to make her condo in Seattle even more of a flashback than it already is:

Being fed up with statues, museums, churches, and operas, I took the morning off today and took the bus out to the Copenhagen suburb of Dragør, south of the airport, just at the bottom corner of Zealand where the Ørsund strait opens up into the Baltic Sea. What a cute little town! There’s a glorious marina, with boats from every corner of the world, and it was fun to eat an ice cream (a Danish obsession, there’s ice cream for sale on every corner in this weird country—and yet the people are very skinny) while walking along the piers looking at the boats. As you know, everyone is immediately ten times cuter if they are on a boat.

Dragør is south of the Copenhagen airport, and south of the bridge to Malmø, Sweden. (It’s easy nowadays to get to Sweden from Denmark: you drive across this bridge or take a train through the tunnel that follows the bridge route. At 7.8 km, it’s the longest bridge in Europe. Reminds me of waterways I know in northern Michigan and in the Puget Sound region, however.) Here I am lounging in the grass behind Dragør Fort, which used to patrol this area and defend Denmark from ships coming up the Baltic Sea, which is spread out to the right; to the left, you can see the Malmø bridge. As the picture indicates, today was a gorgeous day.

The day climaxed in a meal for the ages: we all ate at Kommandanten, one of Copenhagen’s nicest restaurants, with a quartet of terrific Brits who had been to Seattle and who are also attending this Copenhagen Ring. I’m sorry I don’t have a picture, but it was an epic meal: five or six courses (I lost count, since there were as many wines); incredibly interesting company; discussion ranging from this Copenhagen Ring to the English garden industry, to differing Anglo and American attitudes towards smoking, the press, and opera supratitles; and an adorable girl who explained what we were eating in English but with a thick Danish accent. I write to you now a very satisfied person, hopeful and eager to round off my Copenhagen adventure with a memorable Götterdämmerung tomorrow.

Going to Operaen

2006-05-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

The new opera house in Copenhagen is quite the thing to see...I’m very proud of our new opera house in Seattle, but this theater has the additional advantage/disadvantage of being on the other side of the canal from the main part of the city. It is possible to drive up from the back side of the island, but for most patrons a trip to Operaen starts here on the far shore, waiting for a boat to come and whisk you across:

Once there, there’s plenty of time to be social in the lobby. One of the fun things about going to a Ring cycle is you always make new friends, because you’re with the same people night after night. The many Danes in the audience are taking special pride in THEIR production of the Ring; for many of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the opera, because it hasn’t been done here in full since 1912. Below, Linda Jenkins and Laurel Nesholm pause for a photo in the very attractive main lobby space.

The lobby, with it’s four levels of tiers and balconies, is all windows and is especially fun because of these three weird iridescent shapes, the name of which I never heard:

You go into the main floor from the lobby through the space pictured below. I wasn’t able to get any good photos of the auditorium, which is a nice, intimate European-size opera house. (European opera houses, in general, seat less than half as many people as their American equivalents. The people in general are more slender, too.)

During the second intermission, opera fans go out to the watch the sunset across the canal:

The opera house has an incredible sloping roof above it, and below it goes down 30 feet below the water level for rehearsal spaces.

The money from the opera house comes from Mærsk shipping, the company with all the boxcars that you see in Seattle and around the world. Copenhagen is also building a new double theater for plays, across the canal from Operaen.

The point is, a really great theater building is a pleasure to visit even when you’re not finding the performance particularly pleasurable.

The Core of the Ring

2006-05-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

I love Siegfried, the third opera of the Ring. It’s got it all—tenderness, humor, passion, politics, psychology, philosophy—and there’s some pretty darn good music in there while you’re at it. The show last night made a strong start and a weak finish, and for me the essence of the problem was musical.

Michael Schønwandt, the conductor of this production, is a big name in the Danish musical scene. I think he still has a lot to learn about conducting Wagner. Last night there were balance problems (where the orchestra is too loud, and drowns out the singers) and tempo problems (usually the conductor trying to go too slow, and the singers fighting them, trying to get them to speed up so they don’t run out of breath), in addition to the various mistakes which the orchestra has been making all along. These major conducting issues were exacerbated by some issues with the casting. Gisela Stille as the Forest Bird got hopelessly confused in her second line (she only has four lines in the whole opera, so it’s a big deal if you screw one of them up). Once again Brünnhilde was sung by Tina Kiberg, Stig Anderson’s wife and a breathtakingly gorgeous woman who doesn’t quite have the voice it takes to sing this part beautifully. We had a new Wotan (that’s three Wotans in one week, making my head spin): Robert Hale, an old pro at this part, covering for someone who got sick. Unlike his predecessors in the role this week, Hale carries around with him enormous musical and personal charisma—he walks onstage and it’s like, BOOM! Wotan King of the Gods has arrived. That’s very important in this opera; Wotan makes his point mostly by his presence, so you have to be able to get that presence tangible, attractive, and even sympathetic, all of which Hale did. What he didn’t do was coordinate with the conductor. I wondered, after the fact, if they had ever rehearsed together, because tempo-wise everything was such a mess! In this opera Wotan mostly sings in a very slow, legato 4/4, which is such an obvious rhythm everyone will notice if it isn’t perfect. I’m also sorry I don’t have much nice to say about the Siegfried, Johnny van Hal. While he looks good, and acted the part marvelously, I don’t think his voice is right for it at all. He’s got a small, pretty, lyric tenor, and seems to have a very hard time singing through his consonants. Although he's a fine actor, I barely understood any of the text he was singing. Last night either the poor guy was being covered by the orchestra, or just running out of gas because Siegfried is such a ridiculously long and strenuous part. Van Hal, a staff tenor who was probably asked to do this role by a management desperate to save money and get another Siegfried, seemed almost suprised when he came out for a bow and heard enthusiastic cheers from the audience. ‘Cause he knew it had been touch-and-go all night.

I should say that we got some fine singing and acting from the people I haven’t mentioned: reprising their roles from the other night’s Rheingold,
Sten Byriel as Alberich, Bengt-Ola Morgny as Mime, Christian Christiansen as Fafner, and Mette Ejsing as Erda. It’s much easier on a Ring audience if the same singer plays the same character each time that character appears.

The concept, about feminism/matriarchalism and setting the Ring in the 20th century, had very little to do with this opera, since there are barely any women in it and the show is very far from realism. That said, I had mixed reactions to the work of the director tonight:

Act One: Loved it. This is exactly how I’ve often thought Siegfried Act One should be staged—as a TV show, a sitcom, in a small suburban house. (Looked Scandinavian to me.) Left, Siegfried questions Mime's lessons about the birds and the bees; later on, when Mime tries to teach Siegfried a lesson about fear, it turns out he's really teaching a sex ed class--Siegfried gets all hard and horny, which is brilliant because of course we hear Brünnhilde music in the orchestra at that point. The opera was set in 1968, according to the dramaturg; the set for this act was a three-floor house, with Mime’s workshop in the basement, a kitchen/eating area on the main floor, and Siegfried’s bedroom upstairs, complete with posters and paraphernalia indicating ‘disaffected 1960s radical youth’. After many fine moments I won’t describe in detail, the act climaxes when Siegfried brings his reforged sword Notung crashing down—-not upon the anvil, which is right there, but upon Mime’s television. This provoked endless, and inconclusive, discussion at a late dinner after the show. I think it was just kind of fun, which makes it really not much of a contribution at all.

Act Two: Hated it. On the other hand, it’s gotta be partly Wagner’s fault, because this act almost never works. In particular, here, the dragon and the bird were disappointing. The dragon was in fact shamefully terrible, beneath mentioning; the bird was kind of interesting, it was a real live bird, probably a carrier pigeon. But it sat perfectly still through its entire long discussion with Siegfried (the soprano messing up her lines backstage somewhere), so still that at first, thinking it wasn’t alive, I was getting annoyed with it. But then it flew up and offstage, just as it did at the end of Walküre when Brünnhilde releases it from a cage after Wotan rips off her wings. When the curtain went up on Act Two, Hagen was hanging around in the forest with Alberich, his one-armed survivalist dad. I didn’t mind including Hagen, although it didn’t really add anything, just as bringing Froh and Donner on at the top of R2 is just a waste of staging rehearsal energy. The Hagen thing here confused some in the audience terribly, who spent lots of energy wondering who that could possibly be.

Act Three: Meh. This act has never been my favorite, partly because it’s all so inconsistent musically. (I feel similarly about Verdi’s Macbeth!) The one thing about the act is, it takes some paint-peeling singing, and we didn’t get too much of that. Instead we were perplexed to find Wotan visiting his old mistress, Erda, who lived in a sort of Traviata apartment and who, it turned out, had cancer (see picture, above); then he argued with Siegfried outside a barbed-wire fence; and the Siegfried/Brünnhilde scene took place on the same aethetically challenged Valkyrie rock we’d seen the other day. Most of this act (after the Erda scene) followed a very standard staging, with the exception of Wotan breaking his own spear at the moment when Siegfried usually breaks it. (Hale just picked it up and broke it over his knee.) No one could figure out why he was breaking his own spear; maybe it had something to do with the television in the first act. Or maybe it was being different just for the sake of being different. Or something to do with the ‘feminist/matriarchal’ concept. Or, it occurred to me, it was the singer, tired of fighting the conductor, eagerly breaking it himself as a way of saying, “Okay, that’s it, I’m outta here.”

Food in Copenhagen

2006-05-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

Someone (a member of my family, with standard Dean priorities) asked me how the food has been so far on this adventure. I’m happy to say we’ve been eating very well, from the yummy morning Danishes with cappucino we had at the fabulous local joint Lagkagehuset in Christianshavn (see left) to the hot dogs and ice cream available on every street corner to the fine meals we've had before and after opera performances, such as this one in the café of the terrific Craft Industry Museum—yes, that’s a Danish quesadilla with jalapenos on it, that thing that looks like a big pancake, or some naan bread.

I’m proud to say we tried smørrebrød, the national obsession, and I thought it was great—that’s a plate full of small open-faced sandwiches on thin rye bread, and they come with all sorts of toppings. The edgiest one I tried was aged Icelandic herring, and I really loved it. Speight, who’s a vegetarian, has been having a harder time than usual finding good vegetarian options; but the rest of us (including Linda Jenkins, pictured below) have had a good gastronomical trip so far—and it looks like it’s only going to get better.

All Danish culture, and all Viking culture before it, is based on the sea, and the food is no exception—we’re really big on fish and shellfish here. Much of the Danish countryside is farmland, but you’re never far from the ocean here, and so you’re always eating its bounty. Below, Mary imitates the pose of her favorite statue, the fishwife on the canal leading to Slotsholmen.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

2006-05-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

Actually it isn’t, so far as I can tell, Denmark is an astonishingly cool place. But I hope you didn’t honestly expect an old Shakespeare buff like me to put together a blog without saying that at some point!

So far as the state of my WagnerQuest is concerned, we’ve got a nice little pattern going. Most of the days this week have begun with a little breakfast, see left (at first, squinting from across the street, I thought this place had a slightly different name and so took this photo for Juraj’s benefit):

After a light breakfast, we’ve typically been trying to get in some sight-seeing, as for example this church from 1170 (Danish architecture from this period is more preoccupied with light and space than some of their southern contemporaries):

Somewhere along the way there ends up being a little food excursion (Seneca, you might want to open a franchise of this fine establishment up in your hometown):

And then before you know it, it’s time to take the water bus, which leaves from the canal at Nyhavn (named for my college town of New Haven, formerly a lot of seedy fishermen’s dives, now more upscale restaurants and housing):

The water bus takes us and thousands of other Wagnerites over to the beautiful new opera house for the evening’s show:

We had a day off without any opera, yesterday, and so took a little adventure out of town and went up the north Øresund coast to Helsingør, known to Shakespeare fans as Elsinore. It’s not far from Copenhagen—about 45 minutes on the train—although it would have taken Hamlet a long time to get here from college down in Wittenberg. Across a narrow strait from Helsingør is the little Swedish town of Helsingborg. Ferries constantly shuttle back and forth between the two cities, and if the water weren’t so darn cold I bet you could swim it:

The castle itself dates from the Renaissance (although it was burned and rebuilt several times), when the Danes noticed that all traffic passing out of the Baltic Sea into the Black Sea had to pass through this tiny little channel, and thus they could get really wealthy by taxing every ship that passed by or blowing them out of the water if they failed to pay the tax. Reminds me a little of all the Ottoman and Italian castles protecting the narrow passage of the Bosphorus, north of Istanbul, which we visited five summers ago. Elsinore (its real name in Danish is Kronberg Slot) is, in fact, a really beautiful castle, much more so than you typically see when you watch a film or go to a production of Hamlet:

It doesn’t have much to do with Shakespeare’s play, however, despite the fact that they seem to be constantly producing the play on the castle grounds and in the nearby town. Shakespeare, everyone thinks, had never been to Denmark (although his patron, King James, had stayed at this very castle, which is where his wife Queen Anne of Denmark had grown up). Will merely revised an older play, which was itself a new version of an old story. But our knowledge that it never really happened didn’t stop us from shouting out our favorite lines from the play at every chance we got, photographing ourselves in the attitudes of the various characters in places where they might have been, and trying to find Ophelia floating in the moat:

After our Elsinore adventure we returned toward Copenhagen, stopping briefly in the town of Humlebæk to check out the fabulous Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (it began as the private collection of a wealthy art-collector, all three of whose wives were named “Louise”). Unfortunately we ran out of time at the Lousiana Museum, and so I can’t say I really got to enjoy all the museum was offering. But I did get to explore their fabulous sculpture garden, a particular interest since a) I’ve always been kind of interested in this art form and b) the Seattle Art Museum back home is about to open a huge new sculpture garden. The following photo shows my favorite sculpture I saw yesterday (I’m sorry, I didn’t get the name of the piece or the artist):

It’s tough, in a two-dimensional picture, or in blathery prose, to represent the extreme coolness of this piece. At the center of the marble sphere there are four windows, two looking out at the camera, both angled from top left to bottom right, but one on top of the plane and one below; the two windows that look to the woods are oriented in the opposite direction, since the plane back there is at perpendicular to the one on this side. Anyway, it’s really fun and makes you want to go and stick your head inside it, or pretend you’re an article of clothing and put yourself in the dryer.

On today’s trip, as you might guess, there was much discussion of the two Ring operas we’ve seen this week, and the singing, design, and concept so far. No one is absolutely convinced, but I’d say most of us are curious to see where director Kaspar Bech Holten and his team are going to take us. Between their feminist/matriarchal approach to the Ring, the popularity of Denmark’s Queen Margarethe, the new novel everyone’s talking about that’s supposed to hit Danish bookstores this morning (Peter Høeg’s The Silent Girl, apparently it too has something to do with rebalancing gender inequities), I’m not at all surprised to find a piece like this one in the Louisiana Sculpture Garden:

We had a very late lunch in the outdoor café at the Lousiana Museum, the best part of which was the view. The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the Øresund; the sculpture garden extends out into well-landscaped grounds that sweep down to the water. In the distance is Sweden, now a little farther away than at Helsingør. Here are John and Laurel Nesholm, posing with John’s ancestral home of Sweden in the background:

John had been to the Lousiana Museum in 1965, and was enthusiastic about making another visit, even a brief one. Laurel enjoyed the museum, but was skeptical of the video art installations, especially the one featuring the drunken, portly Danish video artist whose ‘piece’ consisted of an endlessly protracted strip-tease which I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch. I think the creator probably hoped to call attention to the narcissistic process of the solipsist artist’s self-revelation. It reminded me more of the Star Wars Kid. For narcissistic self-revelation, I always say, nothing beats a blog!

So long, Arch

2006-05-25T23:08:00.000-07:00

After singing in the performance of Macbeth in Seattle last Saturday night (as Lady Macbeth’s Doctor), Archie Drake had a major heart attack; he was taken to the hospital, held on for a while, but in the end gave up the ghost. Our Seattle Opera contingent in Copenhagen was extremely sorry to hear this news (we’d been getting updates on email all week), although in a way it’s what he would have wanted, because he was singing up until the very end.

Archie, pictured above in the role of Luther in Tales of Hoffmann (another great photo by Rozarii Lynch), was still singing at the age of 81 last week; he was a special favorite of the Seattle audience, and people were still commenting how great he sounded in these recent performances of the cursed Scottish opera. (Of course it was THIS opera that was his last.) I’ve always been extremely fond of Archie, who sang Lillas Pastia in my own first Seattle Opera production as title guy (Carmen in 1995). He’s been with the company since 1968, sung hundreds of roles, thousands of performances, and was always great fun to have around, as entertaining offstage as he always was onstage. One of his fondest memories was playing Wotan in a Seattle Opera Ring back in the 1970s. The director of the production was a great Wotan himself, bass George London, and apparently he understood that Archie wouldn’t make a career out of singing the king of the gods: London told Arch, “If you’ll change your name and grow three inches, I can make you a world-class Wotan!”

A few years ago I did an interview with Archie, obstensibly about the early days of Seattle Opera, but we ended up talking even more about his pre-Seattle Opera life. Born in 1925 on the North Sea coast of England, he had fought in the British Navy in World War II and after the war worked in the British merchant marine before becoming an opera singer and working up and down the west coast of the US in the 1960s. He lived a really fascinating life, and was a Seattle treasure. He’s reputed to have been working on some memoirs, and I have truckloads of material from this interview which was never published. It is my great hope that the story of his life will be told in more detail very soon.

In other news, I was happy to hear (again, via email) that my mother’s surgery was successful the other day and that she is once again walking without pain. I look forward to seeing her in northern Michigan, in a few weeks’ time.

All About The Warrior Girl

2006-05-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Although I was a little disappointed by the Rheingold, I had a much better time of it last night at Die Walküre. (Let’s face it—Rheingold is really hard to produce, and I’m bound to be an unusually severe critic of any production.) But last night we heard a really lovely group of singers, including the incredible Stig Anderson as Siegmund, with Stephen Milling (left) doing his terrifying Hunding and Susanne Resmark a nicely sung Fricka. James Johnson was the Wotan, one of the few non-Danes in this production (he’s from Portland). Anderson’s wife, Tina Kiberg is our Brünnhilde this week, and she’s a wonderfully giving performer. So was the Sieglinde, Gitta-Maria Sjoeberg.

While the feminist/matriarchal concept makes more sense in this opera, since it is all about the women, still there are things about the production which give me pause. My problems all stem from knowing the words too well; anything which contradicts the text throws my head for a whirl, and it takes me a while to get back in sync with the story after that. So for instance, in the first act, in the libretto, Siegmund is a rough-and-tough wild forest guy who has to take refuge for the night in the primitive house of Hunding, a fierce tribesman. In this production, they were both guys wearing ties from Hollywood in the 50s, and so the basic setup of the scene didn’t quite add up. Similarly, Wotan in Act Two is a god at the height of his powers and worship. He isn’t a human being. When a production tries to make it about human beings in some realistic context, he inevitably becomes a repulsive, pathetic, shabby loser. Which doesn’t fit the music.

Anyways, a few specifics about the show last night (feel free to skip to the next post at this point!):

Technical issues in the first act. The Hunding hut was a kind of house based on a Frank Lloyd Wright design (it helps to have an architect with you at the theater to recognize these things!), popular in Southern California in the early part of the century; and it only took up a small part of the center of the stage picture, the rest of the picture being obscured by a big black drop. At the moment when spring enters the hall, Siegmund takes a chair and smashes it through the big wall of windows facing backstage; the black drop flies out, the whole stage spins around, and we see outside the hut (which from the outside is a hideous black box) a hill with trees and red flowers falling from above. Except last night the trees, which come down from the flies, got messed up, starting swaying and swinging wildly, stopped halfway, and just as poor Stig sang “Winterstürme wichen—” the big red curtain came in and the conductor stopped the orchestra. Much grumbling from the audience. After a moment’s pause, they lifted the curtain, we began again a measure or so before the “Winterstürme”, and the scene continued to the end on the final tableau as it was supposed to look. So, not a horrible catastrophe, but I felt really bad for the poor singers, who had been singing a great first act and whose momentum—building up to the wildly orgasmic climax of that love scene—was so rudely interrupted.

Wotan’s chessboard. Act Two began with the same scaffolding bridge where the gods stood at the end of Rheingold, up in Valhalla; it reminded me the most of the BBC Gormenghast after Johnny Rhys-Meyers as the villainous Steerpike takes over for Barquentine, the Master of Rituals, and transforms his office into a nightmare-fascist headquarters. (Wotan, we are told, represents all the failed –isms of the 20th century.) Below this bridge, on the stage floor, there are several clay tablet torsos: a girl-torso with an S, and guy-torsos with S, H, and F. These are referenced several times in the act, and I understood because I know the text really well; but I spoke to several people at the breaks who never figured out that these chess pieces stood for Siegmund, Sieglinde, Hunding, and Fafner, with the gods manipulating them (à la Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis manipulating chess pieces standing for mortals in Clash of the Titans) from above. For instance, Wotan, when he sang“Siegmund falle!” smashes the Siegmund tablet in a thousand bits. An okay idea; but it’s hard to have an emotional reaction to that, and makes it really difficult to get the point that Wotan has come to love the mortals with whom he’s playing this mortal game of Harry Potter battlechess.

Why laugh? This is a tragedy. When Wotan tells his Valhalla flunky # 3 “Der alte Sturm, der alte Müh”, the supernumerary playing the flunky laughs loudly, then exits so Wotan can be alone for his confrontation with Fricka. Similarly, when Wotan usually kills Hunding with a contempuous wave of his hand, singing “Geh...geh!” last night Hunding just laughed evilly and stalked offstage. I found both of these directorial choices a little perplexing. Ordinarily, it’s tough to get an audience NOT to laugh at that Wotan-Fricka scene, which is about a wife nagging her husband into killing his illegitimate son. It’s one of the greatest scenes in world drama, and I suppose if you’re married maybe you do always find something funny about it. Maybe the director thought by having the guy onstage laugh at the idea, it would deter the audience from finding it funny. I don’t know. I also wonder about having Hunding survive Wotan’s finger-of-death moment; it diminishes Wotan, and particularly since his next line is “Wait till I catch up with Brünnhilde! She’s gonna get it!” And last night, since he had failed to punish Hunding, it looked like he only got mad at Brünnhilde because he needed to beat up on somebody and she was available.

Sieglinde awake. One of the things this director love to do is to put characters into scenes where Wagner didn’t ask for them. Froh and Donner, for instance, are onstage when R2 begins; they mime all sorts of stage business the director has invented until they are really supposed to enter, at which point they begin singing. Similarly, Sieglinde was awake last night during the long scene in which Brünnhilde comes to Siegmund to announe his death. (Ordinarily she’s passed out and is sound asleep downstage somewhere, so they can argue about her without her hearing.) I found it strange that she was conscious during this whole scene; at first it was a little interesting, since I was wondering whether she could see/hear Brünnhilde (who as an immortal perhaps could appear to Siegmund only); but then it became clear that having her awake wouldn’t add anything to the scene, and I kind of forgot she was there. I’m still not sure what the point was of keeping her awake. Makes her stronger, perhaps, since she’s now less schizo than she usually is, and this director may be interested in strengthening all his female characters as much as possible. But the result is the staging keeps fighting the text and the music.

Ugly Valkyrie Rock. While the orchestra played a fun (and very loud) "Ride of the Valkyries," I was unhappy when the curtain went up on the third act set (above). In Wagner’s Ring, you spend huge amounts of time on the set for W3, the Valkyrie rock, and I thought this one was particularly ugly. It was a rooftop observation platform, initially full of piles of dead 1950s GIs, with a bunch of Valkyries in 50s evening gowns, sipping champagne, each with a nice pair of big black wings. The sloping cement floor was dripping with blood from all the corpses (which unfortunately looked, as they usually do, like plastic corpses that weighed nothing). The big scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde was played inside the observation center, which we see after the set swivels around and another big black drop flies in, leaving only this strange hexagonal room. I’m hoping this set will evolve when we return to this location tomorrow night and for Götterdämmerung.

Real Fire. Ring productions in Seattle are well-known for always featuring real fire, and so does this Copenhagen production. The fire starts up on the rooftop when you get the fire music at the end of W3. And I noticed something really strange—fire, visually, is chaotic, like a fractal: a shape of nature. Nothing artificial, man-made, clean or angular about it. And that’s great—that’s SO IMPORTANT in a Ring production, because the text and the music are like that; craggy, weird, unpredictable. Not only is the Ring all about nature, it has a naturalness of form (by which I mean organic, superficially extremely complicated although it does follow interior logic) which a production will deny at its peril. What I noticed last night, when we saw the natural chaos of the fire, was how artificial and manufactured the rest of the design had been, particularly the design for the Valkyrie rock set of W3. (On the other hand, setting the Ring in the 20th century mandates a certain amount of artificial shapes, since nature has little to do with most of our 20th century lives.)

Sightseeing in Denmark

2006-05-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here’s a quick report on some of what I’ve seen these last two blustery, wet, cool days in this fabulous and weird country:

Canal Tour. We hopped on one of Copenhagen’s famous Canal Tours the other morning, which is always a great way to get a feel for any city. Denmark is mostly islands, and Copenhagen is on the large island of Zealand; the Øresund strait separates Denmark from Sweden, and the Copenhagen canals are basically extensions of the Øresund. The new opera house is built on an island across the biggest canal from the main part of the city, seen here from our canal ride:

After the tour we returned to the new Royal Danish Library, a building known locally as the “Black Diamond.” It’s cool the way it leans out over the water; as you sail by you can see the rippling of the water reflected in the glass and the black stone. I went to the library hoping to find a little free wireless, but alas! it’s not that easy in this city.

Roskilde Adventure. We took a train over to Roskilde, the ancient home of the Danish kings, a little city on lovely Roskilde Fjord. Here’s a photo of Speight Jenkins in the Roskilde Domkirke, paying his respects at the column which contains the mortal remains of one of Speight’s heroes, Harald Blue-tooth, the ancient Viking king who championed the conversion of the Danes to Christianity in 980 A.D.

Viking Museum. The reason I dragged everybody over to Roskilde is that I really wanted to check out the Viking Ship Museum, which was one of the great adventures of the year so far for me (the other being my first time ever scuba diving, back in February, in Hawaii, on a day that looked much like this one). Somewhere around 1070 A.D. the inhabitants of Roskilde sunk five old Viking ships across their harbor to slow down the attacks of Norwegian Vikings, and over the last fifty years archeologists, historians, and sailors have been having a great time digging up the remains and reconstructing replicas of the original Viking boats.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that while my obsession with Vikings complements my obsession with Wagner, I’m the only person I know who seems to care about both subjects. Wagner’s Ring operas are obviously inspired by the myths of the ancient Norse people, and the Vikings worshipped gods who are characters in Rhinegold. But most of the Ring fanatics I know find the literary background to the Ring unimportant. I won’t say it’s the key to the cycle, but I think it’s an important road into the work and a great thing to study in and of itself.

Below, Roskilde’s reconstructed Viking warship, which held 80 men and could travel from the North Sea to the Mediterranean in two weeks. (They’d all be kind of rank by the time they got there...but I doubt these guys were too concerned about making a great impression.)

An All-Danish Ring

2006-05-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

One of the most remarkable things about this Copenhagen Ring cycle is that the cast is entirely Danish (at least as far as I can tell). The Ring features lots of roles (like around 30) and none of them are easy to sing. It’s tough enough just to put together a cast to sing the darn thing. And to do so only using singers from this one, admittedly productive, but quite small country is really remarkable. My sense after listening to the Rhinguldet tonight is that, had the casting director been working with people from all over the world, it’s unlikely that all these particular singers would have been engaged; but to restrict yourself to all Danish singers and even find a complete cast (two, actually, because most of the parts are double cast) who could simply sing the Ring speaks well of the state of singing and singer training in Denmark. We could probably do the same in America; I know we couldn’t if we restricted our search to the state of Washington, which is itself bigger than Denmark. Special favorites at tonight’s Rhinguldet included Stephen Milling (whom we’ve often heard in Seattle) as an adorably sympathetic Fasolt, and the charismatic Sten Byriel as a wild, white-haired, Willem-Dafoe-as-Green-Goblin Alberich.

The dramaturg at Det Koneglige Teater, Henrik Engelbrecht, gave a brief overview to the “concept” of this particular production for audience members standing in the lobby shortly before the Rhinguldet began; he intimated that the production would be about the 20th century, with Rhinegold in the 20s, Walküre in the 50s, Siegfried in 1968, and Götterdämmerung in the late 90s. He also suggested that if there was a message to their production, it could be described as ‘feminist’; ie the many horrors of the twentieth-century can perhaps be attributed to the male energy making all the decisions, and wouldn’t the world be a different (and perhaps better) place if only women were in charge? The expensive program for tonight’s opera also included a synopsis in English featuring such surprising plot points as “When Alberich sees the maidens adoring a handsome young man whom they call the Rhinegold, he feels even more hurt and angry. He kills the man in anguish and steals his heart” or “Wotan meets a woman, Erda, with whom he falls head over heels in love. She reminds him that life should be lived, and he soon realizes that love should not be traded for power” or “Wotan feels he must silence Loge: he knows too much. He transforms him from a god to pure fire.”

It’s probably way too early for me to sit in judgement on any element of this concept. The ideas are certainly interesting, even if they’re very far from the ideas that might have been percolating around inside Richard Wagner’s oversize head while he was thinking about this show.

What I notice about myself, attending a prodution like this one, is what a reactionary-traditionalist I am. I’ve never staged a Ring cycle myself; instead, I’ve attended four, written a set of titles for the whole thing, and made an hour-long children’s opera in English of tonight’s first chapter. But in my fantasy production, we always SEE whatever the imagery might be in the music. I believe Wagner achieved a miraculous synthesis of text and music, and would love to expand that synthesis to include the visual image as well. Thus, I get slightly bent out of shape by productions that not only don’t visualize what’s in the music, or the text, but that go out of their way to visualize something else instead. Example: in the first scene of this opera, there are several long passages of music illustrating stage action: Alberich the clumsy, repulsive dwarf chases three sleek, pretty mermaids around a riverbed. Let’s admit it: Wagner was asking for a lot, this is tough to pull off! It’s hard to make a baritone look like an ugly, scary dwarf; it’s really tough to make a trio of opera singers look and swim like mermaids; and to choreograph a movement sequence to this music which a) looks real, b) doesn’t get repetitive and boring, and c) is tense/dangerous/dramatically interesting is a tall order. BUT THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO PUT ON THE SHOW! I find it a cop-out, if, like tonight’s director, you tell everyone to sit in place during that music and wait until the end to re-enter the drama.

A few notes on the unusual things about the staging, for those of you who like this kind of thing. (You others, skip ahead to the bottom!)

- The swimming pool. The first scene was played in an empty swimming pool, with a bar at the bottom; Alberich was a guy at the bar foolish enough to think he could pick up one of three flappers. But of course, women cluster in numbers like that for protection, and he had no chance against the three of them. Cute staging bit: Flosshilde, in the third seduction, gets down on her knees and takes down his pants, as if she’s going to give him a blow job; then she empties the bucket of ice sitting on the nearby bar into his shorts. He then winces as he sings his terrible cry of “Wehe! Wehe! O Schmerz! O Schmerz!” and it was nice to see him in physical pain while he sang that anguished music.

- - The Rhinegold. The gold here in Denmark is an attractive naked man swimming back and forth in a little fish tank behind the pool; word on the street was he went up for a breath every time he disappeared from our sight. He was beautiful, and his first appearance—as the girls sing their wildly joyous cry of “Rhinegold!”—brought tears to my eyes. A really powerful and unusual image. And as the program implied, at the end of the scene Alberich climbed into the pool, stabbed downwards with a piece of broken glass, and the water turned red. I was happy to read, after the fact, that it was the man’s heart he was removing, ‘cause in the theater I couldn’t see it and didn’t know what body part it was.

- Fafner the Monopoly Man. Fasolt and Fafner enter by descending, in an elevator we didn’t know was there, from the construction site where they’re finishing work on the Empire State Building of the gods. Fasolt is a big, sweet, dumb, bearded worker-guy in overalls; Fafner is in a wheelchair, with a bow-tie and top hat, and has a ridiculous fat-suit pillow which didn’t look real. He reminds one a little of the tycoon caricature from the boardgame Monopoly; and a little of Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. I deeply appreciated the detailed psychology of the weird relationship between the brothers in this production.

- Alberich’s evil magic. Nibelheim was a mad scientist’s grand guignol dungeon, with various body parts hanging in sacks attached to generators, and, in the center, a large cylinder in which Alberich stood for his transformations. The dragon was nasty-looking, although I couldn’t say exactly what it was; it looked sort of like a larva, sort of like a white asparagus, sort of like a penis. The toad looked like a little plastic toy toad.

- Brutalizing Alberich. The ring in this opera tonight was no ring but rather a bracelet; to get it off the dwarf, Wotan ended up sawing off his arm with a knife. I thought this was probably overkill. It didn’t really scare me, since I had seen it coming, and was more grossed out than surprised. For the top of Scene 4 Alberich was chained, spread-eagled, in a 1920s basement/dungeon that reminded me of a hospital set from one of the Godfather movies. Wotan was increasingly unsympathetic in this scene, while Loge was increasingly pathetic and wimpy.

- Rhinegold stands or falls by its Loge. I can’t say I was a fan of this interpretation of Loge: he was a schlepp, a nabob, a bald guy with a comb-over who smoked way too much and seemed incredibly disorganized and useless as a lawyer. At the end, Loge replays the reel-to-reel tape of his interview with the Rhinedaughters (who sing, in a scratchy 1920s-style recording “Rhinegold! Rhinegold!”) and sings his ironic last line; and then Wotan stabs him with his spear. I wondered why we were jumping to the end of Götterdämmerung already; the program (and Wotan’s subsequent action, taking Loge’s notepad out of his coat and pocketing it) indicate that Wotan felt Loge knew too much. Perhaps, if they are both human beings. But that certainly isn’t what Wagner said; he had both of them gods, with Wotan more powerful than Loge. If the gods were human beings, then ordinary laws of human morality might apply to their behavior; and then you open a door to all sorts of trouble.

So in the end, I can’t say it was an entirely satisfying evening in the theater. But it certainly was interesting (it only sagged a little in the second half of the second scene, where—I find—Rhinegold usually sags), and we had a lively time eating salmon and drinking local Pilsner afterwards, arguing about the production and the singers.

oN THE oTHER sIDE

2006-05-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

First impressions of Copenhagen: a wild, rainy, windy day; endless lines of bicyclists at every stoplight; a vast pedestrian shopping mall standing in for downtown; and, perhaps due to the excellence and fabulous-ity of design in this country, everything and everyone is fun to look at. It was wet when I got off the airplane, but it cleared off into a really lovely afternoon; Mary and I found our way to Nørrebro, a fun residential neighborhood a little north and west of downtown, and found (in the Assistens Kirkegaard cemetary) graves and memorials to those Great Danes Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and, of course, Hans Christian Anderson. (SIFF-type shot of Mary in the beautiful park-like cemetary at top.)

24 Hours in Copenhagen

2006-05-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Wow! Internet access up here in fair Scandinavia isn´t simplicty itself, as I had assumed it would be. A lesson for those planning on doing this kind of thing--not a bad idea to look into access each place you´re going before your trip begins.

In any event, SAS flies a great flight from Seattle to Copenhagen, the train system here is simplicty and beauty itself, and everyone in the city bicycles everywhere. Mary and I spent yesterday afternoon tearing around the city (found the beautiful Assistens Kierkegaard cemetary, where lie buried Niels Bohr, Søren Kierkegaard, and Hans Christian Andersen), then rendez-voued with Speight and Linda for Tapas in the evening. This morning we took a canal boat tour of the city, then checked out the Dansk Design Museum and the wild new library, and, in an hour or two: off to RHEINGULDET!

Me and Richard

2006-05-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

Before this goes much further, I want to say a thing or two about being a Wagner fanatic. 'Cause I obviously am one, otherwise I'd never be going on this trip; and if anyone is reading this you either a) are a Wagner fanatic or b) know Wagner fanatics and are probably a little curious and a little more suspicious about why we're so weird.

I fell under the spell of Wagner twice, once when I was a little kid, and again when I was an adolescent. If it hits you that early, it's hopeless; you're a lost cause. When I was 8 or 9, it was the stories, the characters and their cool names, and the sound of the music--especially the orchestra--that did it to me. I got hooked on the RING when the Chereau Bayreuth production was telecast in the US, back in the early 80s; and I had a recording with orchestral excerpts which I loved, and a big picture book of watercolors by Ul de Rico, which I still think are amazing and powerful.

When I was a teenager, it happened again...this time it was the Met telecast, in 1990, and a more adult experience of what's so remarkable about these operas--Wagner's unique fusion of words and music, where the sound is the story and vice versa, and the two are meaningless without each other.

Since then, the RING has never been far from the center of my life. I came to work at Seattle Opera because the RING is the company's signature piece; I've now worked through four RING summers at Seattle Opera (and two Februarys producing my children's adaptation of the RING's first opera), translated the entire thing for English captions, taught classes on it up one side and down the other, and I still always find it beautiful and fascinating. I'm greatly looking forward to hearing and seeing a production of the RING this week in the new Copenhagen opera house, Det Kongelige Teater. (Check out the link to learn more about the production.)

By the way, Wagner wrote some non-RING operas which are nothing to sneeze at, either. I came to those later, and to the bizarre story of his life, which (if you don't know it) is a wildly entertaining opera in itself. As a Wagner fan, all of this is important to me; but it's my relationship with the RING which makes me a fanatic.

Planning and Other Dangers

2006-05-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

The weird thing about being a human being, if you ask me, is this business about past and future. I doubt any species spends as much brain-power and energy as we do worrying about times that are not now. For me, and for several people I know and love, it comes down to occasionally being incapable of being in the moment.

The other day at lunch, for example, my close friend Mary (pictured above) and I were having a very leisurely discussion about what kinds of things we might want to do next week while we're in Copenhagen. Another member of our Seattle Opera contingent heading for Copenhagen--who will remain nameless now, but probably not for long--expected us to have the whole thing carefully spelled out, the schedule carefully arranged on a series of forms, charts, and graphs. We did our best to reassure this person that we wouldn't be wasting anyone's time while on the trip; but I still maintain that the easiest, most pernicious way to waste time is not to live it while it's happening, either because you're spending NOW thinking and planning about what's next, or because you already planned NOW so carefully, thought it through so completely, last week, that when it's happening it's no longer interesting to you.

Don't ask me when a blog is happening...is it now/then, as I write/wrote, or now/soon, as you read/will be reading? I gotta confess, I will have been curious to find out or to have found out.

And all that said, my great WagnerQuest is already planned out pretty darn carefully. The pieces of writing (non-blogs) which are supposed to be created are much more vague...but I've always found that if I've already written a piece very carefully in my head, I have zero interest in writing it down for real. It's all about discovery...about putting down words where once was blank paper. (Or internet space.) Just as travel, for most of us, is about putting down memories, lived human experiences, where once there were just dots on a map.

Almost Time To Go...

2006-05-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

It's Friday afternoon now; I get on the plane on Sunday. But it feels like my adventure has already begun. It's inevitable, it's already happening, and I know it will pass by like a blur.

Briefly, then (if such a term is even applicable to someone as long-winded as me, thank you Polonius): Who am I? Why am I taking this trip? What is my goal?

I'm Jon Dean, 32 year old Seattlite, teacher/writer by trade and enthusiastic about cycling, presenting with PowerPoint, Wagner, and alternatives to everybody owning a car. If you are reading this blog, I'm guessing you already know me, so I'll spare myself the awkward and impossible task of introducing myself any further. (Or, as Austin Powers puts it: "Allow myself to introduce...myself. My name is Richie Cunningham and this is my lovely wife Oprah!")

Why am I taking this trip? A handful of reasons.

REBOOTING THE SYSTEM. It's been a long winter and spring here at Seattle Opera, where I'm on the education staff (we work with schools, host zillions of educational events, create publications in various media, and translate every opera into English), and tend to run myself ragged trying to make sure that everybody in the audience understands and appreciates what's going on on the stage. Since January we've produced five operas, and it's a lot of work. These last few weeks I've been feeling more than usually ragged, and thus am taking two months away from Seattle to "shut down" and "restart", as it were.

WRITING. I do so much writing as part of my job, in Seattle, I rarely get around to writing non-job-related material. Last fall I managed to write a sizeable chunk of a fiction piece I've been thinking about for years; I hope to create more of that while on this adventure. Similarly, I've been talking for a long time now about a screenplay loosely following the crazy life of Richard Wagner; hopefully that, too, will take shape as the journey unfolds.

FAMILY. We often produce Wagner's operas here in Seattle in the summer, and we Wagner fans live for that--but the shows are long and complicated, and before you know it the summer is over. My father built a cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan back in the 1950s, and although I spent most of my childhood "Up North", as we call it, I've never really been there in the summer as an adult. So taking off most of this summer will allow me to spend some time Up North, writing and enjoying my family (all of whom will turn up there in June and July).

SEEKING RICHARD. I knew I wanted to take this summer off when it was decided, for financial reasons, that Seattle Opera wouldn't be producing Wagner's Meistersinger this summer but instead another opera by a different composer. (And that's all I'll say on this blog about that other opera.) I'd been looking forward to Meistersinger for years, because it's his greatest libretto and thus lots of fun if you're the person doing the translation for English captions (who is me). I've translated 8 of Wagner's 10 'canonical' operas; the only two I have yet to work on are Tannhauser and Meistersinger. So this summer I'll be going to the locations of those remaining operas, and to lots of the places where Wagner lived and worked, as I SEEK RICHARD. One other thing I already know about this trip--the key to Meistersinger, I've always asserted, is Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm excited to begin and end my European WagnerQuest adventure with performances first (next week, in Copenhagen) of Wagner's Ring, and finally (in June, at Glyndebourne in the south of England) of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream.

So what is my goal? Ideally, the completed (and brilliant) manuscript of my "Soldier's Tale"; the fleshed-out screenplay for the Wagner-film project (untitled as yet, think of it as a cross between Amadeus, Topsy-Turvy, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings); memories of lots of wild and wacky adventures with the fun people who I'm already planning on being with and those whom I don't yet know; and (if nothing else) this blog.

I've recently been challenged to join the ranks of the bloggers, and this trip sounded like a good excuse. Usually when I travel I keep an illegible and, where legible, incomprehensible journal and take endless digital photos, later subjecting innocent passers-by to the long and torturous Power Point show that emerges. The blog seems as if it may offer a better place for me to set everything down and a more humane way for those who are interested to see what I've been up to. The real goal being to hang on to present experience; to prevent life from becoming what Demetrius says of his midsummer night's dream:

These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

Soon enough, I know, my great midsummer adventure will seem a distant memory of a dream...a great one, I hope!