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Winter 2009/2010
The U.S. has better luck exporting opera than, for example, exporting democracy. New York's Metropolitan Opera beams its Saturday matinee performances live onto big silver screens in forty willing countries around the world, while our current democracy export struggles along in but two reluctant countries. In France alone about eighty towns and cities make some Saturday nights (at the decalage horaire of six hours) opera nights, and here where it matters most cinemas in Nice, Cannes, Toulon, Marseille, Nimes and Montpellier present the Met's Live in HD simulcasts, three of which are coming up in December and January.
Les Contes d'Hoffmann (December 19) is a new production staged by Broadway director Bart Sher, whose play Joe Turner's Come and Go at the Belasco Theater lured the Obamas for a highly publicized night out last summer. Not that productions matter so much to Live in HD audiences as the nature of the screen prefers the close-up rather than the stage picture, thus we relate more to the performers than to the mises en scene. The visage of beautiful Russian super-star Anna Netrebko will fill the screen while tearing our hearts out as poor Antonia who sings herself to death in the second of Offenbach's Tales.
Der Rosenkavalier (January 9) is a different story. It is an old production, very old (forty years and it was an anachronism even then) so it is a rare chance to see how opera was staged when scenery was illusion painting rather than dimensional architecture. While Renee Fleming's Marshallin may be described as more Hollywood glamor than aristocratic Viennese she is a magnificent stage presence and singer, and appropriately well beyond forty.
The next week (January 16) Carmen will fill those thousands of screens around the world, but as everyone knows the opera should really be named Jose, because the story is about him and why he kills her. That murderer is tenorissimo Roberto Alagna who stalks our very neighborhoods from time to time (Monaco, Montpellier, Orange).
The first of the Met's Live in HD to be seen in France was La Fille du Regiment (April 2008) starring France's most famous diva, Natalie Dessay. Just now the Laurant Pelly Met production (he is head of the Toulouse National Theatre) seen on Live in HD was at San Francisco Opera allowing me a direct comparison of the screen and stage versions. It was no contest -- only the big stage gives proper space to operaÕs overwhelming proportions.
There is plenty of real opera upcoming in our region in December and January. See for yourself why opera house opera makes a better show than movie opera. Toulon Opera stages Carmen December 29 and 31, Monte Carlo Opera stages Les Contes d'Hoffmann January 23 - 31 with Neil Shicoff, once and maybe still of the world's great Hoffmanns (he turned 60 this past June), and Montpellier stages La Fille du Regiment December 27 - January 7 in the Davide Livermore production from Trieste (he is a very cool, smart and witty stage director from Italy).
If the mise en scne is your thing, as it is mine, besides Montpellier's Daughter of the Regiment, you might try Marseille Opera's Cendrillon (that's Cinderella if your French is not up to speed) in the Renaud Doucet production, December 23 - January 3. This still young choreographer, born in Saint-Cloud (near Paris), used to dance with Marseille's prestigious Ballet National before taking on opera assignments in Germany and the U.S. His production of Cendrillon comes to Marseille from the New York City Opera where its premiere was a tribute to Beverly Sills whose career was a Cinderella story in itself.
This is Massenet's Cinderella, composed some sixty years later than Rossini's far more famous La Cenerentola. Massenet's Prince Charming is a trouser role, sung by a Falcon soprano (for those of you not up to speed on soprano voices, a Falcon soprano, uniquely French, is essentially a full lyric with a dark voice), his Cendrillon is a light lyric soprano and her Fairy Godmother is a coloratura soprano. The French have never warmed to males with female voices, thus in Marseille and elsewhere these days Prince Charming is sung by a tenor. Dommage.
Not to be missed is Parsifal at the Nice Opera, January 15, 17). Not so long ago the Opera de Nice had fallen into an artistic stupor under Paul-Emile Fourny. Its new general director Jacques Hedouin is of impeccable pedigree (Opera de Lyon, Theatre du Chatalet). He is jump starting Nice artistically with a production of Wagner's last opera designed and directed by famed Swiss minimalist Roland Aeschlimann with choreography by the American avant garde maven Lucinda Childs in association with two prestigious, progressive European theaters, the Grand ThŽ‰tre de Geneve and the Leipzig Opera.
Parsifal plays not at Nice's miniature and very beautiful belle epoch opera house but at the Acropolis, a large exhibition space that can accommodate big opera production among other big events. The Ville de Nice amusingly apologizes for the 80's (read mediocre) architecture of this facility while extolling the virtues of its public spaces quand meme.
Spring 2008
Considerable stress may be associated with attending opera, stress created by fear of boredom, apprehension that the singing and conducting may be poor, or even dread that the production (mise en scène) will be thoughtless or, worse, stupidly thoughtful. Opera is not a light-hearted experience. Opera's most important muse is the tragic one, those brutal murders are strangely uplifting. Its most delicate muse is the comic one, as operatic humor is rarely amusing and in fact never is when it thinks it is.
So pour yourself a stiff drink and sit down with the summer festival brochures to decide carefully how you are going to spend a few thousand euros as wisely as possible over the next two months. Do not look to opera critics for help, because we are famously not prescient, our experience having proved that all opera is a crapshoot, you pay your money and you take your chances.
Opera festivals need audiences, so much thinking goes into creating attractive, safe programming. This summer the festivals have decreed that we like old operas, even very old operas. We may not recognize the names of the operas but certainly, and safely, we do recognize the names of the composers -- Handel and Hadyn in Aix, Purcell and Pergolese in Montpellier. That's Belshazzar and L'infedelta delusa in Aix and King Authur and Sakustia in Montpellier. The Purcell King Arthur is extra intriguing, as it is staged by "Shirley and Dino," the saviors of the decrepit Cabaret Paradis in the 2006 hit film of the same name.
The Aix Festival right from the beginning associated itself with Mozart, knowing that his operas assure audiences. Thus this summer Aix offers Zaide, an opera Mozart left unfinished which is now making the rounds to alleviate the hyper-saturation of Mozart's twenty finished operas. But it is of interest because its metteur en scène is the American wunderkind Peter Sellars (though by now, like most of us, well past that stage of life). If sometimes self indulgent, Mr. Sellars is brilliantly witty and always intelligent.
Of the usual Mozart repertory Aix is perpetrating yet another Cosi fan tutte. There remain lingering memories of a truly lame earlier one (1999) staged by Chinese cinematographer Chen Shi-Zheng (co-creator with Peter Sellars of Tan Dun's opera The Peony Pavilion). This new one is staged by Iranian cinematographer Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940) in his opera debut. Mr. Kiarostami is known for films that take place in the backseats of cars. Not that Aix fared better in 2005 when Patrice Chereau, a truly venerable theater director, staged a famously static and utterly boring Cosi fan tutte.
Strangely Montpellier has associated itself over the years with little known composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, opera composers you have never heard of, and probably will not ever again, who are absolutely meaningless at the box office. This summer it is Ildebrando Pizzetti's morbidly post-Romantic Fedra (1912), libretto by Fascist personality, poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, and the world premiere of Louise [!] Breton's 1836 opera La Esmeralda, libretto by none other than Victor Hugo, composed with the encouragement of Hector Berlioz, a piano reduction provided by Franz Liszt (though of course it is performed with orchestra in Montpellier).
The lure of famous names does indeed fill theaters, thus the Aix Festival has imported the Berlin Philharmonic and its wunderkind conductor Simon Rattle (though like most of us he too is well past that stage of life) for Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. This year is the third installment, Siegfried, as staged by theater director Stéphane Braunschweig. The first two installments have not been well received and Seigfried is feared as the boring one of these four magnificent operas, thus there is good possibility that you can find a ticket (350 euros). The cast is blue ribbon indeed (Willard White, Ben Hepner, etc.). The moral of this story is that though you may buy prestiege you cannot buy success.
For me, everything mentioned above is not to be missed -- I will pay my money and take my chances. But there is so much more in Aix and Montpellier, and Orange too, not to mention nearby village opera festivals. Have another, stiffer drink and take a look.
Fall 2007
There have been a few big operatic moments in San Francisco where I have caught the fall opera seaon, like Samson destroying Delilah's temple, like Graham Vick's inspiration of having Wolfram throttle Elisabeth in Tannhauser who otherwise would have died of heartbreak, and like a big slice of Americana, Philip Glass' Appomattox, the hokey civility of the signing of the treaty ending the bloody American Civil War and hours of breast beating about American civil rights.
Big of course does not mean good. Well maybe the collapse of the temple would have been good in War Memorial Opera House had we seen it there. But we caught it and the whole opera along with 30,000 other people simulcast on the fog shrouded giant scoreboard (10 x 30 meters) of the Giants baseball team stadium, one of San Francisco Opera's more dubious community outreach ideas.
But the San Francisco fall season was just an aperitif for the opera here in the south of France where this season we can catch about fifty different operas in our nearby opera houses. There are some expected duplications of repertory – Monte Carlo, Montpellier and Barcelona all offer Don Giovanni for example. But both Toulon and Monte Carlo offer Janacek's Jenufa, this masterpiece should be seen in both theaters. Both Toulon and Montpellier are doing Gluck's Orphée et Euridice, the French version that is considered his masterpiece, Orpheus sung by a baritone with coglioni and not by the castrato of the Italian version, without. Plus the French version adds a ballet, and fortunately for us the glory of Toulon Opera in recent years has been its ballet. In recent years Montpellier has simply left holes where ballets should have been.
Both Nice and Marseille offer Massenet's Manon, the pinnacle of French Romanticism. This splendid opera deserves some special attention as it leads to operatic adventure. First we go to Amazon.fr to get a copy of Abbé Prévost's 1731 novel, the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. Some say Prévost's tale of the beautiful young woman Manon who loves luxury more than she loves the love of a young philosophy student is autobiographical and that is why he became the abbé Prévost.
Massenet tells Prévost's story with tragic embellishments. The priest Des Grieux, again enthralled by Manon, wins at cards only to be condemned for cheating. The now penniless Manon, condemned for prostitution and awaiting deportation, dies on the road to Le Havre in her lover's arms. The grandness and luxury of Nice's Opéra, re-built in 1884, the year of Manon's premiere, uniquely evokes this brilliant era on the cote d'azur and the melodramatic lives of so many of it inhabitants so desperately in need of money. Not to be missed. This opera may be a bit out of place in down-to-earth Marseille.
Nine years later Puccini tells the story in the much bolder strokes and vivid colors of Italian verismo, bringing his Des Grieux, now rich through the luck of his cards, to the deserts of Lousiana with the banished Manon where she dies of thirst. Not one of Puccini's indestructible masterpieces, his 1893 Manon Lescaut is delicate, easily overwhelmed with too much conducting, production, and/or singing, attributes that are the forte of Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice. This is one for those of us who love danger.
Pushkin tells a similar story imbued with the tragic fatality that is the omnipresent in the Russian soul -- here the poker cards themselves precipitate a melodramatic tragedy. Tchaikovsky's operatic masterpiece Pique Dame (Queen of Spades) is the Pushkin story whose heroine Lisa, unlike Manon, loves love more than riches. Pushkin leaves his hero not in Prévost's monastery but in a lunatic asylum, mad not from grief but because he was betrayed by cards, by the queen of spades herself. Tchaikovsky wisely avoids a mad scene at this point in the story having already shot his dramatic wad in the several great big soul satisfying scenes. His resourceful hero simply stabs himself in a final throbbing crescendo.
But for Pique Dame we must travel a bit out of our usual orbit. In late January the Opéra de Lyon mounts a new production (rare, very rare for Lyon to produce) of this unusual masterpiece staged by radical German director Peter Stein, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, music director of the Komische Oper Berlin.
Adapted from an article by Michael Milenski in the Var Village Voice, November 2007
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