Old Operas That Make Tommasini Think Of Today's World

[lennygoran]

I found this article interesting. Regards, Len

Trump Has Changed a Night at the Opera, Too

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI MAY 26, 2017

It was two days before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, and I had never been so eager to be heading to a production of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” The contentious election and its stunning result had left Americans bitterly divided. Spending a few hours in the comfort of the Metropolitan Opera enjoying the madcap adventures of Rossini’s endearing characters would surely provide a welcome escape.

A wonderful performance that evening was doing the trick. That is, until the scene when Don Basilio, a music teacher in Seville (and the town’s most wily operator), explains to an employer, the crusty Dr. Bartolo, how to take down a young rival.

No problem. You just hint at some dark secret about your target and ruin his reputation with a scandal, Basilio explains in the aria “La calunnia,” his guide to spreading a calumny. You start a rumor and watch as the falsehood wafts on a gentle breeze, he sings, passing into people’s ears, and then out their mouths. The whisper becomes a murmur, then a mighty blast, until the poor victim must skulk away in disgrace.

I can’t even guess at how many times I had heard the aria before. But suddenly, amid charges of “fake news,” outrageously untrue reports going viral and brazen lies, Rossini’s 200-year-old opera seemed eerily contemporary. Basilio came across as the operatic prototype of a cynical, modern-day political operative whose repertory of dirty tricks has hardly dated.


In moments of national crisis and dissent, many classical musicians have made statements through their art. I’ve been thinking lately of another divisive inauguration, President Nixon’s second in 1973. The night before, official inaugural concerts were taking place at the Kennedy Center (the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program included the “1812 Overture” and Beethoven’s Fifth). At the same time, Leonard Bernstein conducted a Concert for Peace at Washington’s National Cathedral for tens of thousands, both those who had seats inside and those (including me) standing out in light rain. With local musicians and a volunteer choir, Bernstein led Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War.” Though not formally a protest performance, it was all but officially the anti-inaugural concert.


We see and hear culture through the context of the moment we live in. A series of performances I’ve heard over the past year, while not specifically conceived in reaction to the campaign or the Trump administration, have wound up having uncanny power.

Political strands within familiar works have been popping out with startling resonance, as with that “Barber” at the Met. The opera was loosely based on the first in a trilogy of audacious plays by Beaumarchais that stoked anti-aristocratic sentiment in late 18th-century Paris. Rossini stripped out much of the incendiary content to maximize the comedy. Or so I had assumed, until seeing it at the dawn of the Trump presidency.

Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” is based on the second play in Beaumarchais’s trilogy. Like Rossini, Mozart, working with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, softened the sharpest edges of the text’s anti-royalist barbs to pass muster with Austrian censors.

Last spring, “¡Figaro! (90210),” an adaptation of “The Marriage of Figaro” with a cleverly rewritten, stingingly contemporary libretto by Vid Guerrerio, enjoyed a successful run at the Duke on 42nd Street. The show returned last month by “electoral demand,” as promoters put it.

Here, Figaro and Susanna are modern-day undocumented workers at the Beverly Hills home of Paul Conti, a loudmouthed real-estate baron who complains of illegal immigrants sneaking into the country and showing no respect for the people who “built it.” He talks endlessly of being a “winner.”

The creators had worked on the piece for several years before the Los Angeles Opera presented the first full production in 2015. (My colleague reviewed a version in 2013.) It predated the rise of Trump, and seems, in retrospect, to have anticipated it.

When I saw the show in March 2016, Paul Conti’s bluster, and the clear parallels to Mr. Trump, felt loose and funny. The audience roared. But when it came back last month, the piece was chilling.

In April, the bold young pianist Conrad Tao presented a deeply personal recital, “American Rage,” in the crypt of a Harlem church. An American of Chinese immigrant heritage, Mr. Tao performed flinty works by Copland and the American maverick Frederic Rzewski, whose leftist convictions permeate his music. The highlight was an incandescent account of Mr. Rzewski’s “Which Side Are You On?” Based on a 1931 song written in support of Kentucky coal miners during a bitter strike, the piece has passages where the plaintive tune is enshrouded in dreamy jazzy harmonies, and episodes where it becomes a driving ram for frenzied agitation and pummeling chords. Mr. Tao’s fearless performance made the piece seem a rallying cry for protest. I had heard this long, fierce piece before, but not like this.


To draw out the work’s themes about the corruption of aristocratic privilege and the crumbling of empires, the director, Robert Carsen, updated the setting from 18th-century Vienna in the time of Maria Theresa to the brink of the First World War. (Soldiers marching at the end suggest that some of the characters may shortly end up as cannon fodder.) Here, Baron Ochs (in a revelatory performance by Günther Groissböck), seems dangerously real, a boorish man who claims aristocratic privilege as a license for sexual aggression.

In an early scene, Ochs brags to the opera’s heroine, the Marschallin, about the winsome young girl he has arranged to marry, the daughter of a businessman who has amassed a fortune as an arms supplier. The baron adds that, of course, his appetite for a good “chase” will continue after marriage. If he sees “anything attractive,” he explains, he must “have it.”

When he is later introduced to Sophie, his betrothed, he fondles her in public, right in front of her obsequious father and young Octavian, the baron’s embarrassed emissary. Before going off to settle details about the marriage contract, Ochs invites Octavian to “do a little flirting” with Sophie, to loosen her up for marriage, just as he might break in an “untrained horse.”


I could not have been the only one in the audience thinking of a certain “Access Hollywood” video.

Next month, New York City Opera will present the New York premiere of the Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos’s 2004 adaptation of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Mr. Eotvos reduces the combined seven hours of Mr. Kushner’s teeming plays, subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” into a music drama of some two hours and 20 minutes. Whole stretches of Mr. Kushner’s arresting dialogue, afire with political diatribes, are gone from the opera’s compact English libretto.

Yet the Kushner plays screamed for music, Mr. Eotvos has said, what with their weaving of grim reality, bizarre hallucinations and fantasy, with characters of operatic dimensions, including a rabbi, a ghostly Ethel Rosenberg, a hyperactive angel, a gay black male nurse, a Mormon mother and Roy Cohn (once a mentor to Mr. Trump).

I was overwhelmed by the plays when I saw them on a single Saturday after the Broadway production opened in 1993; I also loved Mike Nichols’s 2003 mini-series version for HBO. I only know the Eotvos opera from the video of the brilliant premiere production at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

Mr. Eotvos’s haunting score, which folds hints of pop and jazz into a Modernist idiom and boldly combines sung and spoken lines, gets at the emotions coursing within the characters and beneath the politics. Mr. Kushner’s title has layered meanings. The angel who descends on Prior Walker, a gay New Yorker debilitated by AIDS, calls for him to embrace his destiny as a prophet. Prior doesn’t want to be a prophet; he just wants to feel better and get back his boyfriend, a big-talking liberal racked with guilt over abandoning his stricken lover.

“Angels in America” suggests that all marginalized minorities, especially those dying in neglect and isolation, are, like prophets, ennobled by their suffering. Gay people at the end of the millennium were almost forced into becoming ministering angels to one another, and into taking on indifferent governmental institutions. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore,” Prior says with resolve at the end. “We will be citizens. The time has come.”

Maybe now more than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/arts ... views&_r=0