enemies of the people

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek offered me tickets to last night's opening of Il Trovatore, an opera I love. For years I happily sailed along with one recording – the celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version – and then one day out of the blue I was hit by Trovatore fever, and when I came to I had fifteen or twenty versions; my favorite, by the way, is still the justly celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version. Any performance of an opera you love produces an odd mixture of gratitude for any live experience of it competing with impossibly high and probably unreachable standards. I’d love to prove my integrity and independence by trashing Festival Opera despite the lovely seats, but, alas for my reputation, I’m instead going to urge you strongly to head on over for one of the remaining performances (July 15, 18, or 20) at the Dean Lesher Center.

Even the Walnut Creek audience was not as egregiously bad as usual (I still wake up screaming at the thought of Rigoletto a few years ago, and the steady, incessant, three-hours-long fortissimo gum-chewing of a woman four rows behind me). Last night we did have the usual number of loud coughers, and an unusual number of ringing cell phones, as if the audience had never conceived of the possibility of turning them off during certain activities. (We even had a dramatic leap out from a seat and into the lobby with much door opening-and-shutting while Leonora is contemplating death.) There was also an annoyance fresh to me (it's so hard to keep up with the irritations of new technology) – little flashlights with which audience members can check I don’t know quite what, but something so important it couldn't wait until the house lights went up.

Maybe the folks with the little lights were checking plot summaries. Quite a few people seem to be oddly unfamiliar with Trovatore, because the absolutely brilliant libretto by Salvatore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare is frequently described as the ultimate in operatic absurdity. These people might be thinking of the tedious finale to the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which is really more about social snobbery associated with opera than about the actual opera, and is almost spectacularly unfunny in either case (I say this as a Marx Brothers fan – but stick to their Paramount films; Harpo in particular suffers from being turned from an anarchist Nature god into a twee and benevolent little Cupid; their decline is usually dated after A Day at the Races, but I respectfully disagree and date it from the beginning of their alliance with MGM – Eric von Stroheim and I will both tell you that Irving Thalberg was in league with Satan).

What Cammarano and Bardare (no doubt under Verdi’s direction) came up with is a concise telling of a complicated story, whose every moment resonates thematically. Is it absurd? Perhaps, but I think that’s intentional. All plots, being more-or-less arbitrary impositions of meaning on life, are absurd. I don’t think this is even a case of one era’s conventions striking another era as ridiculous; even in the nineteenth century the baby-swapping mix-ups came in for their share of ribbing (Gilbert and Sullivan, or at least Gilbert, basically wouldn’t exist without Trovatore to play off of). Is Trovatore absurd and meaningless? Is life? Gloucester leaping off a non-existent cliff, Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave, Oedipus marrying his mother, Vladimir and Estragon waiting day after day for a man who never shows up – these are also absurd, and their absurdity is part of their meaning. Every action in Trovatore is interrupted, every narrative is fragmented and obsessively repeated; personal tragedy becomes a haunting camp fire ballad becomes a story of supernatural frights; parents do not know their own children, lovers mistake each other, the usual duels and battles and kidnappings are all cut off abruptly and the action turns elsewhere with the arbitrary and terrifyingly inevitable logic of dreams. Trovatore is an example of high Romantic storytelling, kin to Hugo and Donizetti, but this is where the Romantic movement interest in the fragmentary, bizarre, and unreal aligns with the Modernist theater of Beckett , Ionesco, and Brecht.

San Francisco Opera’s last outing with Trovatore played up the link with a modern staging, which on the whole I liked (black, boxlike setting, bursts of fire, large fragmentary objects floating in space); Festival Opera goes for a more traditional approach (pretty much what you would get at San Francisco Opera these days; there was a lot of stand-and-deliver in the style of SFO’s recent Lucia, though often more subtly handled). Giulio Cesare Perrone’s direction was solid and efficient, with the occasional misstep (though I did particularly like the point when the Count di Luna makes Leonora swear she will be his: he stretches out his hand, and Leonora first raises her hand papal-blessing-style to Heaven as she swears, and then lowers it onto his hand so that only the tips of her fingers condescend to touch his flesh). The same was true for the sets, lighting, and costumes. Perrone had also designed the set, an efficient arrangement of columns raised on a few steps that was varied with the additions of branches, prison bars, or cathedral arches, an arrangement which not only made for suitably rapid scene changes but emphasized the underlying similarities among soldiers’ camp, gypsy camp, church, court, and prison. The costumes are basically handsome and traditional, but someone needs to get the Grace Jones headdress off of Manrico, and those shiny dangly things under the headdress need to go too. Other than that the differences between Manrico’s followers and di Luna’s were nicely emphasized by the use of vests and turbans for the former and traditional court or military gear for the latter. Matthew Antaky and Patrick Hajduk are both listed as the lighting designers, and again their design was efficient with some nice flickering touches, and a couple of strange moments (the lighting in the dungeon varied over the course of the scene from way too bright to bright to gloomy).

Michael Morgan conducted a nice performance and seemed very attuned to the singers. And the singers are where the Festival Opera production has it all over SFO’s last Trovatore (Dolora Zajick’s Azucena is the only singer I can recollect from that production, because she so overshadowed the rest). I knew the evening was promising when Kirk Eichelberger opened with a vivid, detailed and powerful account of Ferrando’s campfire story (but confidential to Kirk: get a different headshot; the one in the program does not do you justice). In a smaller role, I also really liked Jessica Mariko Deardorff as Leonora’s oddly unsettling attendant, Ines. I was not as happy with Scott Bearden’s Count Di Luna; “Il Balen” in particular seemed choppy and lacking in style and beauty. Perhaps he was having an off night. Patrice Houston’s Azucena didn’t push Zajick’s sound from my memory, but she was solid; perhaps a bit too much so to be necessarily sympathetic. Azucena is one of the great examples of Verdi’s compassionate understanding of the disenfranchised; she could so easily have been a stock character (evil Gypsy child-killer!) instead of one who sometimes steals the show. But she should seem more distracted and perhaps more fragile. Houston seemed too sensible. She also seemed to lose a bit of power at the end; her final cry was not as piercing as it should have been, and the supertitles didn’t help by stopping with “He was your brother!” and omitting “Mother, you are avenged!” and di Luna’s cry “And I still live!”

But on the whole I found the ensemble effective, and the two leads outstanding. Noah Stewart as Manrico was strong and ardent throughout, with (to my hearing) only a few occasional moments of strain or exhaustion. Hope Briggs as Leonora just seemed to go from strength to strength. She was committed, radiant and beautiful throughout, and her rich and lovely voice was possibly more powerful at the end than at the beginning. My guest for the evening was a singer who basically agreed with my reactions. But he, with his concern for long-term vocal health, was also worried that the singers were perhaps too young to be taking on such heavy roles, and that given the small size of the house they were singing louder than need be. Perhaps, but I found the sound viscerally, physically thrilling. Despite my reservations about Bearden and to a lesser extent Houston, here is an evenly matched, beautiful ensemble of youthful voices. Let’s see if San Francisco can do as well on its next outing.

the sleep of reason produces Italian opera

The San Francisco Opera’s season-ending Ariodante did not disappoint, once we all got over the withdrawal of Eva Podles several weeks before the run began. I was glad that my years of subscribing to SF Opera ended on a good note both on stage and in the audience. The whole thing felt rather elegiac, since I entered the crazy little world called opera through the baroque repertoire (I saw stuff like Rameau’s Zoroastre long before my first mainstream opera, which was Rigoletto, in an inadequate Met touring production). Baroque opera is why I don’t believe people who complain about the lack of melody in new operas; baroque opera is nothing but gorgeous melody after gorgeous melody, yet there is often an aura of palpable discomfort in the audience when the usual Verdi-Puccini-Donizetti-and-sometimes-Wagner fare is replaced with Handel, or occasionally even one of his lesser comrades. I don’t know if it’s the A-B-A aria structure that frightens people (though they should be used to a certain amount of this from Mozart), all the girls dressed like guys and guys sounding like girls, or the unfamiliar plots, or some combo of all those things. But perhaps repetition and exposure are wearing away that resistance too; the audience for Ariodante was remarkably attentive and receptive, at least the night I was there. Perhaps word had just gotten around that SF Opera had a season highlight here.

The storyline, surely familiar to all of us from Ariosto’s delightful Orlando Furioso, seemed a bit perfunctory, but I don’t know if that’s the libretto or the staging. It didn’t really matter, since the plot did what it was supposed to do, which was maneuver the characters into varied emotional states. Baroque plots always seem more complicated than they are. Years ago V actually accompanied me to a Handel opera (I’m drawing a blank, embarrassingly enough, on the title, and I’m not where I can check it, since the SF Opera on-line archives do not include Merola performances). She made the mistake of trying to read the plot summary, which I realized as soon as I saw the increasingly baffled look on her face, the plot being one of those “the shepherd Florimel, disguised as the shepherdess Floribel, is in love with Flomarinda, who is disguised as some damn thing, because she is fleeing from her father. . . .” I told her not to read the plot summaries; they only confuse you. The action is always perfectly clear when you see it on stage. I’m here to help.

I’m not going to make (too much) fun of baroque plots, either. All plots are arbitrary arrangements, and whether or not they seem ridiculous or contrived is just a matter of which conventions you’re willing to accept. When SFO did Rodelinda a few years ago, I read one review (it might have been in the Wall Street Journal) that was puzzled by the film-noir staging, finding no link between the two styles: well, both are highly stylized forms that use elaborate plots to suggest deep levels of corruption and cruelty. It seems close enough to me. I knew a woman (as we go back again to my early days as an opera-goer) who dismissed all baroque opera plots out of hand as absurdly unrealistic, yet her favorite opera was Tosca. Obviously Tosca struck a deep mythic and sympathetic chord in her, but it’s not exactly a storyline that could have been torn straight from the pages of my non-existent diary. I mean, if it could have been, I’d probably actually keep a diary.

Susan Graham as Ariodante and Ruth Ann Swenson as the beloved Ginevra were the outstanding singers in the all-round excellent cast, with Richard Croft’s Lurcanio close behind. I have heard from others that Swenson was a little variable during the run, but I had her on a good night; she really does have a golden tone that has always sounded well in the War Memorial Opera House. I can’t disagree with SFMike that Graham’s performance only confirms her divinity. I was a little mixed about Podles’s replacement, Sonia Prina; her runs and other baroque vocal extravagances sounded quite precise, but the overall sound was fairly harsh; it worked very well for the villainous Polinesso, but I’m not sure I’d be really eager to hear it in a more sympathetic character. My only complaint about Patrick Summers’s conducting was that I thought the pacing for the two big arias (Ariodante’s Scherza Infida and then Ginevra’s lament shortly after that – sorry, I don’t have the libretto with me and can’t be more specific with the first line) was a mite slow, almost to the point of slacking in tension – yet Graham and Swenson both were intense and wonderful in their singing despite that, which is why I’m giving them my much-coveted title of Most Fabulous Among the Fabulous. I liked the Tiepolo-ish costumes, and I also liked the setting (mostly movable dark-green marbled walls with golden cornices), but there did seem an odd disjunction between the colors of the costumes and those of the walls, as if some baroque Merce Cunningham had designed the show.

This was just one of those evenings where the work and the performance and the audience all clicked, at least for me (see Brian at OutWest Arts for an alternate take, though; and check out Opera Tattler’s Ariodante log for a thorough review of the score and the audience over several performances). Thus endeth the subscription. I did briefly contemplate getting a “choose your own” series for next season, but decided I might as well take the opportunity to sit in different areas of the house. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure I could come up with the minimum four operas next season that I really wanted to pay for. In at least some fairness to SF Opera, since I’ve mentioned several times that they’ve never bothered to contact me about my lapsed subscription, I should point out that I received a form letter from them last week – I’m not criticizing them for sending a form letter; actually, I think it’s great that they reach out to everyone; I certainly wasn’t expecting an individually tailored letter – expressing regret that I didn’t renew, giving me Gockley’s e-mail address in case I wanted to express my concerns, and suggesting one of the “choose your own” subscriptions. (At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it said – I was in kind of a rush when I read it.)

I don’t think I’ll e-mail any blog links to Mr Gockley, but I do have one bathetic request: someone over there at the War Memorial Opera House really needs to keep the men’s room stocked with paper goods. A couple of times this season we haven’t had any paper towels to dry our hands, and before Ariodante I actually had to pass a roll of toilet paper under the stall to the desperate man next to me. Little things add up to big impressions.

my gashes cry for help

Lucia di Lammermoor was one of the first operas I bought. I had seen an Australian film called Man of Flowers, and though I normally sit all the way through the credits anyway this time I had a purpose besides extraneous thoroughness, which was to discover the source of the haunting duet featured on the soundtrack. I loved the film but I really loved the music, and I bought the cassettes (yes, it was that long ago) the next day. San Francisco Opera, which has in my experience an extremely adequate record with the Italian classics, has always done right by Lucia, and they pretty much continued the streak with their latest outing.

I was in the house for the performance that was simulcast to Major Phone Company Park (maybe I should explain the joke to out-of-towners or non-baseball fans: the Giants' new stadium was first called Pac Bell Park, which was fairly euphonious, but over the past few years, as the sponsoring phone company has merged or subdivided or metastasized or whatever it's doing, the name has changed to SBC Park and then AT&T Park, but since they aren't paying me for the naming rights I figure I can call it what I want). I understand from a friend who was there that it was a fun, relaxed atmosphere, with kids running around and people picnicking, with everyone enjoying both themselves and Lucia's murderous insanity, which is totally nice but I prefer my opera without all the distractions, though I have been wishing I were at the ballpark, but mostly so that I could watch a ballgame (it’s funny that while opera houses are starting to broadcast as widely as possibly, baseball games increasingly can only be seen on a few pay cable channels).

After the presentation of the San Francisco Opera Medal to Kip Crenna, the company’s musical administrator (I was a little startled to see Gockley casually pull the medal-case from his pants pocket; couldn’t they get a super to do some sort of Octavian-presents-the-silver-rose thing with it?), we then had to stand for the National Anthem. I love the Star-Spangled Banner, mostly because no one can sing it and the tune comes from an old drinking song, but my patriotism has dropped to just about zero over the last, oh, eight years or so, and besides I was exhausted and did not feel like standing; although the Opera House was fairly comfortable, we had had a few days of temperatures hovering around 95 degrees. But as soon as the quiet drumrolls that begin the overture rolled out, I realized why they needed to play the anthem: how else can you let those in the ballpark know that the show is officially about to start?

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Graham Vick’s production, given all the wacky whatthefuckery (which I liked) of last fall’s Tannhauser. His Lucia is fairly conventional; there were lots of sliding panels, which were no doubt acoustically useful, and scenes indicative of the outdoors; the costumes were mostly traditional-looking tartans (with Lucia’s bridegroom, nicely done by Andrew Bidlack, and company differentiated by their formal English court attire); the blocking was pretty basic. At several points I had the impression that the chorus was simply grouped by voice type and standing pretty much as they would at a choral concert. Nothing scary and radical, and nothing especially enlightening either.

I particularly liked the rippling pointillism provided by the harpist (I assume this was Michael Rado as listed in the orchestra personnel), and Alexander Marguerre on the glass harmonica was outstanding – I’m not sure if I’ve heard the mad scene done live with the glass harmonica before, but I’m now convinced it’s the only way to go; the extra echoing eeriness is worth any trouble involved in finding the instrument or someone to play it. But this was pretty much the Natalie Dessay show. The earlier Lucias I had seen in San Francisco starred Ruthanne Swenson, and though I would say Swenson had a lovelier voice, Dessay has a more powerful and committed stage presence, chiefly because she can act, as in, she could have a career on stage even if she couldn’t sing at all. She carefully moved from a coltish young girl to the blood-stained bride, vacant-eyed with grief. Edgardo, her true love, was played by Giuseppe Filianoti, and though I have heard glowing reports about him I can’t say he came across as a star, though in fairness to him I should note that by the time his big scene rolled around at the end it was quite late and everyone around me was however unwillingly nodding off in the heat, including the couple next to me who had driven up from Monterey and taken a hotel room for the night just so they could hear Dessay live for the first time (it was her San Francisco debut). They (actually, just the wife; the husband sat there in goggle-eyed silence except for an occasional loud interjection during the performance) asked me if I had gone to any of the Met simulcasts; I said no, since I thought they had the inconvenience of live performances (especially given our three-hour time difference with New York) without the compensatory benefits; she disagreed, and said that for people like them, living far enough from San Francisco to make a trip to the opera a major undertaking, they were wonderful, which I think is fair enough. They had seen Daughter of the Regiment with Dessay, and then Manon. There are very few operas I consider pretty much a complete waste of time, and one of the few that tops Daughter of the Regiment on that list is Manon (though I do like Puccini’s version), but I had seen Dessay in Le Rossignol and also as Ophelia in Ambrose Thomas’s Hamlet, so I recommended those to the Dessay fans. That Hamlet DVD (with Keenlyside as the Prince) is outstanding, particularly if you can forget that it’s based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is easy enough to do considering how inadequate it is as an operatic version of the great tragedy, but can I just say that, amazing as Dessay is as Lucia, I had the slightest sense of déjà vu since I had also seen her run mad as Ophelia?

I retained enough energy to stand and applaud for Dessay as she deserved before stumbling out for the long trek home – I was so tired I couldn’t even walk in a straight line. During the curtain calls, in a delightful touch, the cast came out wearing or carrying various items of San Francisco Giants fannery as a salute to the audience in the ballpark, and once again I wished I had one of those crazy camera phones that all the kids blog with, so I could capture Dessay with her huge orange foam “Giants #1!” finger. You’ve gotta love that she did that, though I couldn’t blame her for switching during her second or third bow to a more stylish cap, which she perched on her head in a manner tres chic.

blown away

I see that Opus Arte lists among its August releases a two-disc set of the Netherlands Opera production of Dr Atomic. It's not yet listed on Amazon in the USA, but usually we get the Opus Arte releases a couple of months after the UK does, so I would expect it in this country sometime in the fall. (It's listed as "all regions" in the description, but I don't know if I trust that, though it might be worth the risk if the exchange rate were more in our favor).

I assume this production is at least partially revised from the world premiere version that left me so disappointed, but Peter Sellars is still the stage director and the cast seems mostly if not entirely the same: Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer, Jessica Rivera has his wife, and Eric Owens, Richard Paul Fink, James Maddalena, Thomas Glenn, Jay Hunter Morris, and Ellen Rabiner. The conductor is Lawrence Renes. My disappointment aside (plenty of people did not share it), I felt at the time that it was a shame a major work by a major American composer was not being recorded and released in some form.

I guess it makes sense to record a new work after a few runs, when the creators have had time to tinker (or slash and burn), but I have the feeling that the more relevant fact here is that it was filmed in Europe and not the United States, because given the welcome DVD release of brand-new works such as Chin's Alice in Wonderland or Dusapin's Faustus, The Last Night, it just seems that recording new works is, for whatever economic or cultural reasons, just more achievable over there. American opera houses seem to be edging in that direction, but I suspect they will rely more on big names in very familiar works. It's too bad. I wish someone had recorded the USA premiere of Le Grand Macabre four years ago, which was the only thing that managed to lift and elate my spirits even momentarily after the last presidential election. There's a good chance I'll need to see it again in the fall, and then where will we be?

and repetition palls him

My last subscription opera was Friday, and since the theater gods had smiled on me and given me a wonderful evening, I decided not to pursue my original plan for marking the end of my sixteen-or-so-year subscription, which was to ascend to the topmost balcony, cry out in electrifying tones, O Gockley – avanti a Dio!, and then hurl myself into the orchestra pit, where with any luck I would land on the cymbals and timpani with a resounding crash. Also, the last thing San Francisco Opera needs is yet another performance of Tosca. Besides, Gockley’s name doesn’t scan right.

So I’ll be slipping unnoticed into the ranks of the single-ticket buyers. From the way I’ve been carrying on, you’d think I was never going to set foot in the place again. But it does feel different, and sad, to me, and I’ve considered just surrendering to habit and resubscribing, even though most of the upcoming season leaves me bored and indifferent. Part of it – and this may just be that relentlessly upbeat, incurably sunny-side-up optimism which has become a byword among all who know me – is that I just cannot figure out Gockley as an artistic administrator, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

I loved Pamela Rosenberg’s programming, but I have no opinion on how she ran the company or worked with people or whatever; I was sorry to see her go, but I had certainly noticed long ago that things have a way of changing even when you don’t want them to, so I was interested to see what Gockley came up with. He is of course best-known for commissioning new works, so that looked promising, and I had a sentimental link to Houston since the first opera I ever saw was their touring production of Porgy and Bess. And on my one trip to Houston, shortly after Gockley had been announced as SFO’s new general director, I had really admired HGO’s production of L’Incoronazione di Poppea.

Since then it’s been a very mixed bag. His first season here had largely been planned by Rosenberg, and though I was not thrilled that his one major change was to add Die Fledermaus to the schedule, I figured that, given all my sneering at opera-goers who refuse to attend anything they haven’t already heard a hundred times, I had better cowboy up and give my first Fledermaus a fair listen. So I did, and the singers were wonderful, the orchestra excellent, and the staging top-notch, and I loathed every minute of it. I’m too lazy to link to my write-up, but I believe I compared it to being clubbed to death with meringues, which makes for a long, sticky, and endless end. But now I know, right? It’s always better to speak from knowledge than prejudice.

Later I read an interview in which he seemed puzzled that anyone responded to that year’s closing production of Iphigenie en Tauride, which to me seemed so clearly one of the most memorable evenings at the opera that season and perhaps for several seasons that I was puzzled that he was puzzled. I had tried to ignore the interviews in which he assured the SF Philistines, like a man trying to soothe a yappy little lapdog, that there would be no “Eurotrash” productions. I hate that meaningless term anyway. I figured that if he needed to assure nervous patrons that they would be fed a safe diet of sloppy seconds from the Met, then that’s just part of running a big opera house.

But it was starting to look as if he just had fairly uninteresting taste. Then came Graham Vick’s Tannhauser, and Gockley made it clear that he felt this was a signature production for him, which floored me, since it out-Rosenberged anything Rosenberg had presented here. I loved it, but many others didn’t, which, let me say, is an understatement. Given the vehemence of the reaction, I wonder if he simply figured San Francisco audiences are even more averse to nontraditional productions than he had thought. But how could someone who spoke longingly of staging Andrea Chenier with big stars from the Met also consider this art-installation Tannhauser a good example of what he was all about?

I felt Gockley did an excellent job this season balancing the new, the familiar, and the less familiar. So I was stunned by the announcement of next year’s plans. The upcoming season is entirely respectable, and if you hear an undertone of dull and safe in that description, then thank you for reading me as I intended you to read me. Rudolf Bing himself might have assembled this season and proudly presented it to his Met patrons; in fact, with the obvious exception of the new works, it may well actually be one of Bing’s seasons, plucked straight from 1954 (oh, the now fashionable mid-century years!) and dropped into the laps of a San Francisco audience that has longed for nothing else, as it wonders vaguely where all the past years went, and why the glitter has left the atmosphere, and maybe Tony Bennett will be singing later in the Carnelian Room. . .

So I can’t just write Gockley off; he seems to have a zig for every zag, and if the cumulative effect is not one I find interesting or appealing, clearly many others feel differently. I was looking at the calendar for next year and realized I could see just about all the operas I was interested in by early October. For all I know by December I’ll be begging for tickets to Boheme, but somehow I suspect that I’ll just check out some of the DVDs that have piled up while I’ve been out: Britten, Janacek, Schoenberg, Berg, Henze, Chin, Dusapin, and Handel, as well as Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini. I know it’s ironic that I repeat myself in criticizing the repetitive season, but we all enjoy our habitual pleasures, and hate to have them taken away, and I'll miss having all my tickets lined up. I sometimes wonder if I rely so much on routine because it frightens me deeply to realize how quickly I adapt to anything’s absence.

Lhude sing, cuccu!

Maybe it’s the influence of the sultry air of summer, heavy, dirty, and mournful with thunderstorms that will never come, but in just two days last week, on ferry boat and BART train, I saw three women reading celebrated novels of adultery: two Anna Kareninas and one Madame Bovary. We all get the yen, and I too felt like putting down Paradise Lost, because even the deepest love can tire, oh, just a bit, after a dozen or so readings, and grabbing a ripe adulteress from the shelf, but I resisted and went back to the battle in Heaven. Reading about it (adultery, not warring angels) is so much easier than dealing with it oneself (well, I guess that's true of the angels as well); go for the glamour and avoid the work. By "glamour" I mean "deep insight into the human condition", of course.

If you’re tired of trains and arsenic, though, you may dazzle and entice your friends with some equally great but more obscure members – and who doesn’t like obscure members? – of the body of nineteenth-century adultery novels, lesser known only, I have no doubt, because they are written in Spanish and Portuguese: Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta and Galdos’s Fortunata and Jacinta from Spain, and any of the novels of the great Eca de Queiros (sometimes spelled Queiroz) from Portugal. As a public service, because that is the sort of thing I do here, I will provide a pronunciation guide to Queiros’s name (which contains various cedillas and things which I am omitting out of laziness and ignorance). I myself have a wretched Portuguese accent, and speak only a few words, but since “I am offended” and “You are shameful” are among them, I am in reality fully equipped for life in Lisbon, though perhaps not in Rio.

Anyway, I asked my father, a native speaker, and here goes: AY – sa duh kay – ROYZH. Do that with a slight backward roll on the “R” and you’re close enough. My father then hastened to inform me that the family (meaning his older relatives) did not consider Queiros a decent author, which is really all the enticement one might need. (By the way, if you read The Maias, and you should, do not read any of the introductory material first, at least in the Penguin edition – there is a major plot point they blithely give away, and you should come across it on your own.) I also used to see every movie condemned by the Vatican until they got around to The da Vinci Code. Not even the Pope’s proscriptive thunder could make me want to sit through that. When I finally heard what the book was about, I was stunned: that’s it? Jesus had kids who now live in the south of France, undoubtedly sucking on Gauloises and sneering at Americans? Look, if they can’t turn water into wine, I’m not interested. What an odd tribute to the human obsession with bloodlines, and what a sad insight into what passes for religious discourse in this country.

Since I’m providing pronunciation guides to Portuguese names, I’m going to put it on the record that my last name is pronounced to rhyme with “jazz.” Any other pronunciation gets a correction from me, and when I occasionally have the pleasure of meeting someone who reads me, I hate for the very first thing I say to be a correction. My grandparents anglicized the pronunciation when they emigrated, and in one of my few faint gestures towards ancestral respect I insist on their pronunciation. Though perhaps what I’m respecting is anglicizing, on behalf of several branches on the other side of the family tree.

Speaking of unsatisfied yearnings and disappointment, I finally have DSL installed, and though the guy from AT&T who had to show up to repair the line here was extremely prompt and helpful, everything else, meaning mostly the speed, has been . . . unimpressive. I haven’t had the heart for my eagerly planned YouTube orgy, because it just takes so much more time than I thought it would. I mean, I’m glad I’m off dial-up, but mostly because it’s just embarrassing still to be on dial-up. If you don’t own a cell phone (I don't), people assume you’re making a statement, as opposed to just being befuddled and stuck in the past, and they might even think it’s some sort of intriguingly independent-minded and subversively Luddite anti-electronic-leash statement, as opposed to “I am unpopular and do not get calls and besides I hate figuring out new technology”, whereas with dial-up all you’re really saying is that you sure do miss 1997.

Speaking of missing things, I'm really going to miss subscribing to the San Francisco Opera. I felt a restless melancholy earlier tonight as I prepared for tomorrow night's date with Lucia di Lammermoor by tearing my second-to-the-last subscription opera ticket from the subscriber ticket sheet I received last summer as I have every summer since 1992. Then comes Ariodante next Friday, and then farewell to Orchestra Left D5, and farewell to my sixteen-or-so years of subscribing and donating. I’ll undoubtedly end up at some of the operas next season, but it's not quite the same. I’ll be damned if I’m going to encourage Gockley as he drains all artistic excitement from the opera house. Technical toys are no substitute. I know I’ve already said I’ll be damned if I encourage the Opera's bold retreat to 1953, but I’ll say it again: I’ll be damned if I pay for a ticket to La Boheme or the lovely though exhausted standards Gockley is trotting out for the walled-in tastes of those who think, or rather who wish, that the musical world stopped with Rosenkavalier. The Opera’s upcoming schedule is not a season, it is a surrender. Oh, here I go again, an obsessive and spurned lover. I do wish them every happiness. What do I know. Maybe they were right to dump me, or, rather, in that classic move, to maneuver things so I felt compelled to dump them. Maybe it all really has been downhill since Zinka stopped singing Gioconda.

Under the circumstances, the San Francisco Symphony is looming larger and more gratefully in my mind. I am, needless to say, way behind in posting, so expect the drawn-out summer nights to be filled with Proustian (long, ravishingly self-indulgent) reminiscences of concerts from months ago (look, it’s all memory as soon as you stop applauding anyway), but I do wish I had written sooner about some of the Symphony concerts, just because I’m so glad to see a big musical organization that seems to be pointed in the right direction. I’m heading there Saturday night for my favorite Beethoven symphony and the new piece by Magnus Lindberg, but even though I’ve been eagerly anticipating this concert all season, still (and watch me ouroboros this whole thing, right here!) part of this faithless lover’s heart will be longing for the exotic charms to be found in hanging with the cool kids at the Columbarium. Go, and live without regrets.

still, the flowers are more poetical

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. All souls' day. Twentyseventh I'll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death's door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren's. The great physician called him home. Well it's God's acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hu! Not a budge out of him. Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder. Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket of fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the boy. Apollo that was.

How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.

And a happy Bloomsday to my mountain flowers. Here's a fun website to check out on James Joyce's music.

And you may tell yourself, This is not my beautiful house!

I saw Francesca Zambello’s “American” Das Rheingold when it premiered at the Washington National Opera two springs ago; the revival at San Francisco Opera is also to some extent a revision, and I think in some ways an improvement.

In DC I felt that the production went overboard with the projections, so that they began to seem not an aesthetic but an economic choice. I understand that the Ring is incredibly expensive to put on, but you can’t really look as if you’re scrimping even if you actually are. I thought the landscape projections both during the scenes and during the musical interludes were nicely done and effective (“That’s the Sierra Nevada!” the old man next to me helpfully announced as we were traveling up to Wotan), but I thought, as I did in DC, that when Alberich uses the Tarnhelm to turn himself in a giant serpent, it just looks cheap to use a giant projection of a snake, especially when the picture breaks over the apertures in the Nibelheim mine. I can’t say I cared for the opening space shots during the prelude, either; the visual echoes of sci-fi movies (which have larger budgets and sharper effects anyway) are unfortunate, and aesthetically entrancing as the rings of Saturn are, they don’t really link up to anything in the music: it’s the creation of the world, sure, but the Prelude pretty clearly gurgles and swirls towards a water-borne creation, and when that music reappears with the Rhine Daughters or Erda you need that link to earthly elements, not outer space, and when the waters rise at the very end and swamp the world, you need that sense that they are circling back onto the very first notes of the prelude, long before. Given the very visual nature of our culture, it’s a shame to neglect the power of a completely dark theater with no stimulus but the rippling music.

The first scene is simplified and improved from the DC production. My memory of that set is of a fairly elaborate gold-mining structure off to the right, with the three Rhine Daughters looking semi-prostitutey in white nineteenth-century bloomers and camisoles, and the Rhine gold (always referred to in the surtitles for some reason as “pure gold”, as if we can’t hear the singers calling it “Rhine gold”) was a large billowing quilt top of sheer golden fabrics. I had mixed feelings about the quilt, since quilts are made of scraps and the Rhine gold needs to be untouched and unformed until Alberich steals it. I thought the switch in San Francisco to a seamless piece of the sheer gold fabric was effective (though the quilt blocks in the earlier version did suggest rich farmlands viewed from the air, which was a nice touch even if I was the only person who thought that) and led to some nicely picturesque effects when the Daughters billowed it aloft or when Alberich wrapped himself in it. After he steals it, the gold reverts to its usual stage form as heavy-looking sacks or glinting rocks.

Alberich still enters dressed as a prospector, which neatly brings not just an American but a local twist to the theme of exploiting and despoiling nature. Maybe because there was less of a camp they seemed less like camp followers, but the Daughters (Catherine Cangiano, Lauren McNeese, and Buffy Baggott) seemed less like whores and more like frontier women this time around. I liked the power of Richard Paul Fink as Alberich, though his voice was sounding tired by the end of the evening, but he was competing with my memory of the mighty Alberich of Gordon Hawkins in DC. I don’t know if this was deliberate or not, but casting a black man like Hawkins as Alberich – the despised, rejected, and angry Other – in the context of an “American” Ring lent a really powerful and troubling subtext to the role, an element that Fink, through no fault of his own, doesn’t bring to the part. (In the same way the usual casting of children as the laboring Nibelungs gained an extra resonance in the light of America’s long history of child labor, which continues in the reliance of American corporations on the poorly paid labor of overseas children.)

This was clearly not a Wagnerian audience; the chatter – please, people! the Master’s music is playing! – during the gorgeous interludes between acts made me think it was maybe just that worst of all opera audiences, the ones who don’t pay attention until The Big Aria, when they suddenly turn into highly critical connoisseurs. Lucia is next week, kids! I don’t know why anyone who cares enough about music to pay those prices and give up an evening would lose a single moment of those rapturously beautiful sounds (the orchestra was in outstanding form) listening to their own voices instead. Maybe they figured the incredibly noisy scene changes meant open season. I’ve actually never heard noisier scene changes anywhere. I really knew it wasn’t a Wagnerian audience after the performance while standing in the immensely long line for the basement men’s room: “That’s it,” one older guy was saying. “They need an intermission.” What a candyass. Try sitting on those Bayreuth seats for the show and then I might sympathize. Or not. I think the whole “Oh my God no intermission” thing is psychological anyway. Plenty and too many movies these days run two-and-a-half hours, even without the previews and soda commercials and dancing snack items singing Let’s Go Out to the Lobby, but people don’t feel trapped in quite the same way. You can get up and leave during a movie without causing quite as much disturbance. But if people can sit for two-and-a-half hours of Sex and the City or Transformers, it’s clearly not too much of a physical burden to sit through an uninterrupted Rheingold as the Master wished.

Probably the most notorious element of the DC production was Erda’s appearance garbed as an American Indian maiden (check any package of Land o’ Lakes butter and you see the costume). You may have heard that the Indian maiden is gone, but that is not the case. She’s just switched regions, from the fringed fawn-colored dress decorated with bright beads and eagle feathers of the Plains Indians to the gauzy white cotton fabric and silver squash-blossom jewelry of the Southwest, a more understated costume that tends to lose the effect, so that I can see why those sitting in the back thought Erda was just dressed in her usual flowing, vaguely Earth-Mothery garments. I had mixed feelings about the original costume and also about the change. On the one hand, I hate the use of ethnic groups as symbols rather than individuals, and the sentimental and erroneous stereotype of American Indians as a simple and harmonious part of nature is pretty annoying. On the other hand, the resonance created by an African-American Alberich also occurs with an American Indian Erda, and though positive racism is still racism, there really is a long history in the United States, dating back to the nineteenth century (to around the time when the Indian nations stopped being violent threats and started being conquered remnants) of seeing the Indians as nobler (because less complicated and more in touch with nature and the basic elements of life) than their white conquerors. Also: the costume is visually stunning, not only in itself but in contrast to the leisure-class white suits and gowns of the bright gods. You lose the effectiveness and the contrast when Erda looks like just a funkier version of the gods. Neither the DC nor SF Erda really overcame the costume; I found Jill Grove the vocal disappointment of the night, fairly hooty and underpowered. Elena Zaremba in DC had a better sound but the wrong demeanor; Ms S of DC had accompanied me and when I ventured the criticism afterward that Erda had smiled too much, she said, “Yes, she seemed very pleasant.” Indeed she did, as if she were the nice neighbor lady down the street who had just shown up with a covered dish to welcome the gods to their new home, along with some common-sense advice about the looming end of all things. Erda’s appearance is one of my favorite moments in the entire cycle, so that may account for some of my disappointment.

Zambello did a really nice job directing the gods and giants. Fafner (Gunther Groissbock) and Fasolt (Andrea Silvestrelli) enter on a cross-beam lowered from the ceiling, and the costume designer (Catherine Zuber) did a terrific job making them look like giants without burdening the singers with stilts. They were a mix of nineteenth century laborers and creatures of myth, on big elevated shoes and in denim overalls, with their shoulders and arms padded for muscle (very effectively and carefully done, in fact, so that they actually looked as if they had the right bulging muscles there instead of just cotton padding), their arms ending in metal hooks and claws instead of hands. Froh (Jason Collins) and Donner (Charles Taylor), despite their bravado and threats of retribution, showed clearly in their curved posture and discomfort when the giants approached them that they felt effete and useless next to them; and beneath the arrogant swagger of the giants (with Fafner suitably the more aggressive) they conveyed a sense of being outclassed, out-thought, and out of place in the bright palace they had built.

Freia (Tamara Wapinsky), in a fascinating insight, gradually returned Fasolt’s love, so that she had to be torn away from him after the giants were given the stolen gold. I’ve never seen this relationship staged like this, but it makes sense – she’s the goddess of love, and why wouldn’t she reach out to someone who so clearly loves her; for all of Siegfried’s and Brunnhilde’s declarations of smiling love and laughing death, neither says or does anything as profoundly moving as Fasolt’s declaration that he cannot bear to give up Freia as long as he sees even the glow of her hair or the glint of her eye. (Once again the exchange of gold for Freia is staged absurdly with the goddess lying on the ground being covered by sacks, instead of standing up and having them piled in front of her, so that the poor singer is trapped down there, being covered – and not even completely, as required for the scene to make sense – with props, until she has to find some more or less clumsy way to get out from under all that.)

Some of those at opening night mentioned to me that they found Jennifer Larmore’s Fricka a vocal size too small; that may have been the case, but if so she had adjusted by the second performance, when I heard her. She gave a precisely etched comic performance of an entitled and frustrated upper-class housewife, from the moment she forces Wotan (a powerful Mark Delavan) awake by thwacking him with the rolled-up blueprints of Valhalla on through to her triumphant entry into the hall, despite the dead Fasolt and the lamenting Rhine Daughters. When Loge (played as a suavely ironic lawyer by Stefan Margita), for whom she had openly expressed her dislike, praises the love of women above all things, she gives him a wonderful look of ironic bemusement and surprise, and her approach to him after that is brittlely flirtatious. She has a wonderfully sharp-elbowed and determined walk when she’s angry and wants to get something out of someone, usually her husband. It was an amazing comic performance, and if I found myself marveling at it some times and disagreeing with it at others, it’s because Fricka is not a comic role. Yes, she is a narrow-minded and conventional woman, and she is as complicit as any of the gods in the building of Valhalla and the theft of the gold – you can’t be a goddess of the hearth without a hearth, and her sense of entitlement is only strengthened by her spouse’s failure to stay at home like a good husband – but she is also always correct. There’s a lot to be said for the rule of law as opposed to grand but shaky schemes, if you want to draw a parallel to American political life today. She is always the first to perceive and accurately point out the fatal logical flaws in all of Wotan’s schemes while he’s still brushing the facts aside as troublesome details, to be dealt with later. Though she plays a necessary role, nobody likes a rulemeister, and it’s just as well to emphasize when you can the moments when Fricka is softer and more sympathetic.

A couple of times Zambello brought characters on stage at moments when they aren’t usually there. Loge appears at the very end of the first scene, as an eyewitness of Alberich’s escape with the stolen gold. I found this unnecessary; he pretty clearly says to the gods that the Rhine Daughters have told him what happened, so there’s no real need to have him stroll on at the last minute to see it, especially since most of what he relates (about the curse on Love, the forging of the Ring, the dominance over Nibelheim, and so forth) are things he isn’t seeing at that moment anyway. It seems like a solution to a staging problem that doesn’t really exist. I did like the physical as well as vocal reappearance of the Rhine Daughters at the end; they obviously are important to the scene, and their lament from the waters is one of the prized moments in the Cycle; it wasn’t entirely necessary to see them in person, ragged, bedraggled, and with imploring hands outstretched, but it was effective, especially since it gave Mark Delavan the chance, with a troubled, dismissive gesture, to emphasize once again Wotan’s tendency to form grand schemes at the expense of the reality he can’t quite dismiss from his sight, as he finally turns his back on them and Loge to bring up the rear in the procession of the gods, who march up what looks like a ramp to a luxury liner, giggling and sipping champagne with the exquisitely refined and appealing frivolity (a quality better conveyed in this production than I have seen it before) that will doom them.

When we left the DC production, Ms S kept saying, “But did you think it was American?” And you may notice I keep putting “American” Ring in quotation marks. As I said back in DC, it makes some sense that a Ring that starts out in late nineteenth-century America will in many places look awfully European. The changes in this production from the original DC staging make me think that further and deeper thought is being given to the themes as the Cycle progresses, but so far, the use of local scenery is not that different from Stephen Wadsworth’s forests-and-mountains-of-the-Pacific-Northwest staging for Seattle, and the presentation of the gods and giants as late-nineteenth-century robber barons and labor is not that different from any of the Shavian (or Chereauvian) interpretations. I didn’t see the Walkure when it was staged at DC, so I don’t know how the "American" theme develops. I’m curious to see how it plays out in the entire cycle; at this point it looks like an interesting but not crucial approach, though this production is well worth hearing and pondering.

the heart of the matter

As you can tell from the previous entry, I did a little prep work, not having read the play in many years, before going last Thursday to ACT’s production of John “Not the Film Director” Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. So I can report that the production is extremely faithful and complete, and I’m glad I went despite the inane chatter during the performance of the two senile harpies behind me, though that wasn’t the only reason I felt a bit unfulfilled by this Whore.

I actually would have been OK with some judicious trimming, not so much because of the running time (though I’m as tired of pointing out the stupidity of starting a three-hour show at 8:00 on a work night as I always am the next day; no wonder audiences tend to be students and retirees, who can sit and enjoy their incest-murder-revenge dramas without thinking about the looming 8:00 a.m. cubicle the next morning) as because the comedy scenes . . well, they take the person of a doofus foolish suitor named Bergetto, and though Gregory Wallace performs him well –the acting throughout ranges from solid to excellent – the character is such a bizarre zany, so clueless and – can I just say mentally challenged? – that the longer he’s on stage the more inexplicable he becomes, so that when an attractive young woman (Philotis, but I’m going to keep plot summaries and character relationship diagrams to a minimum here, because you’d be better off spending the time it would take you to read the complicated summaries and explications in just reading the play) wants to marry him you can’t possibly figure out why. A little of this sort of character goes a long, long way; I’m faulting Ford, not the performance.

Much of his humor is of the robustly bawdy sort (“I like his codpiece!” announced the woman behind me, the more egregiously offensive one, in the Pepto-Bismal pink jacket, and here I might as well compliment the periodish costumes by Candice Donnelly, who no doubt would have done wonders with Pinkie behind me) so beloved of busty serving wenches at Renaissance Faires and English majors who want to play dirty without dirtying themselves. I will freely admit that I have an addiction to even the grossest sexual puns myself, a fault (if fault it can be called) which I attribute to a lifetime of reading Shakespeare, but can I just say without getting all Dr Bowdler here that I’m tired of the whole “bawdy humor” thing? It gets too coy and precious, and over-emphasized, when it should be obscene, and just one element among many. Seriously, rent some porn and yank it out of your system, and then maybe we could perform pre-Victorian works without the constant nudge-wink emphasis on all the naughty bits, and place a little more emphasis on the poetry and philosophy. But of course the audience chuckles at every hip thrust, in case anyone thinks they didn’t get it, and I just think of Polonius, who is for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.

I’d say that “of course” (of course, you should always beware of a statement that follows of course) ‘Tis Pity survives for its tragic scenes, but I’ve come across (or overheard) a surprising number of theater-goers who assume it’s a comedy (apparently on the theory that “whore,” being one of those above-mentioned bawdy terms, is inherently comic), so I guess we live in a world – and I ask you, what kind of world is this? – in which even veteran audience members don’t realize this is the tragic tale of Giovanni (Michael Hayden), his sister/lover Annabella (Rene Augesen), and her husband Soranzo (Michael Earle Fajardo). Most of the poetry and philosophy are supplied by the brother and sister, which is one of the elements that unites them against those around them. High praise to all three leads for capturing the quicksilver intensity of this triangle.

The blithering hags behind me mentioned (during the performance, of course; some insights just can’t wait) that it was very Shakespearean, which is true enough; there are Shakespearean echoes throughout, and though some, like the comic rundown of the suitors by the saucy maid, seem like standard theatrical devices that we only remember thanks to Shakespeare, some echoes are just too specific: watching the troubled philosophy student Giovanni grapple with his incestuous yearnings amid the comical parade of various unlikely suitors is like seeing Hamlet dropped into the wooing of Bianca.

So I was basically enjoying the performance very much, admiring the actors, particularly the three leads, and admiring the multi-level unit set, hung with strings of large iridescent glass beads and twists that lent a slightly tawdry yet dazzling air to the shifting scenes, yet feeling that somehow it wasn’t quite catching fire for me, when we came to the end. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who has read or seen this play always remembers one thing (maybe I should put in a spoiler alert here, just to be nice, though the point I’m about to make is that this memorable one thing doesn’t happen in this production): at the denouement, Giovanni enters with his sister’s heart, which he has cut out, impaled on his knife. In this production, though Giovanni kills the pregnant Annabella as required (and though the program notes made much of the literal and symbolic role of the heart in this play, and how the play was written shortly after Harvey’s discovery of the heart’s role in the circulatory system), they shied from the final tragic grotesquerie, and Giovanni’s pointed remarks about Annabella’s heart lost their literal meaning. In short, Ford and his play walk sublimely off a cliff, and director Carey Perloff and ACT declined to follow.

I can’t really blame them, even if it meant they didn't go quite as far out as the play demands. There was enough clueless laughter (which is different from nervous or unnerved laughter) during passionate or ironic moments to make me think a large portion of the audience would have just lost it if Giovanni had been walking around with his sister's heart on his dagger. Perloff said something I really liked in her “From the Artistic Director” letter in the program: “. . . ‘Tis Pity is one of those big meaty classics that are disappearing from the stages of the American theater, as both our economy and our attention spans constrict. As the American theater seems to move closer and closer to television realism, it is thrilling to reconnect with a classic work that is truly theatrical, poetic, ambitious, complex, and metaphoric. So we feel incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to explore one of the great plays of the 17th century [OK, here comes the part where she loses me] with one of the great audiences of the 21st.”

Look, I understand she needs to say that, but I’ve sat in too many local audiences to think that we have the great audiences that great theater deserves, or even that deserve great theater. The two women behind me, obviously regular theater-goers, are too typical of the breed: blithely chattering (despite being shushed several times), too oblivious to everything but the rusty clanking of their own brain-gears, too smugly pleased with their own status as theater-goers (yet identical in their reactions to any of the much-scorned television audience), too quick to offer opinions instead of to pay attention.

Years ago I read that Joseph Conrad said of his art, “Above all, I want to make you see.” I thought that was sort of obvious, but over the years I’ve realized that this is one of those remarks, like “Love thy neighbor,” whose simple surface conceals a maddening, endless and endlessly ambiguous imperative. Nothing is harder than just seeing what is happening accurately and, while maintaining concentration, withholding your own judgments until the end, when you can separate the wheat from the chaff. No wonder so many religions condemn the theater while stealing its best effects; both are in the business of making you above all things pay attention to the elusive underlying. This may seem like a heavy burden to lay onto, for example, Feydeau farces, but there are all sorts of degrees here, and the comic is as worthy and exalted as the tragic.

So I walked out feeling like Savonarola, disgusted at the unworthiness and frivolity around me, but what he burnt as vanities I wanted the crowds to worship as our closest simulacrum to truth, or at the very least to admire as some sort of justification for humanity’s continued existence. I applauded the actors as they deserved, and then hightailed it out of the profaned temple before I turned around to the babbling lumps behind me and said or did something I wouldn’t regret.

In case anyone needed a justification for blogging

Music as well consists
In th'ear, as in the playing.

John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Act II, scene i

Watchman, what of the night?

On Memorial Day morning, which was cloudier and colder than expected, I stood in my living room trying to figure out which of the many things I had left undone I should try to do. I was in one of those moods where there was so much I should be doing that I couldn’t do any of it, so I was pretty much just wandering from room to room looking more or less helplessly from here to there. I couldn’t even decide when I should take my shower, so I was unshaven with my hair all askew, but I had at least managed to change from my nighttime shorts to jeans and a wifebeater. I looked out the window and saw two very nicely dressed black women, probably in their late 50s, coming up the walk, and since I had at least managed to get semi-dressed I decided that I would be courteous and take the copy of the Watchtower they were going to offer me, because I could tell immediately that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Some people get venomous about the Witnesses, but I don’t. In my experience, they’re quiet, polite, and well-dressed, and all they want to do is offer you a pamphlet. There are worse visitors in a neighborhood. It’s not as if I need more things to irritate me, so if I can be easy-going about the Witnesses, I’m going to seize the opportunity.

Anyway I went to open the door after the two women rang the bell, and since I figured it would be an extremely short visit I didn’t bother to pause my CD player. I had at least managed to decide what CD to put on that morning: the first disc of one of my new Marston sets, the Complete Recordings of Marie Delna.

So I opened the door and one of the women was about to give her talk when she stopped and said, “Oh! What lovely music!” “Oh my, yes!” said the other. “Yes, it is,” I agreed. It was Disc 1, track 16, Printemps qui commence from Samson et Dalila, and as I stood there on my porch with the two Witnesses that piece gave way to the next track, another selection from Samson, Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix. The three of us stood there for a few moments listening to the swelling beauty of a voice captured on disc in Paris in 1907.

After a pause the women roused themselves to offer their literature, but one burst out, “Oh, it’s just so beautiful! I would love to have a massage to that music!” I found that totally charming, since at some point in the past few years “having a massage”/“going to a spa” apparently became the absolute pinnacle of whatever serenity and beauty is possible in life. So the two ladies, Anna and Anna Maria, offered me the Watchtower, which I took, and since they had also commented (“You should sell those!”) on the many lemons on the tree in my backyard (and it’s true, that wonderful tree has a shining abundance of fruit year-round, especially in the branches visible from the sidewalk, which get a lot of late afternoon sun) I offered to give them as many lemons as they’d like. They politely declined, since they were on their way to services, and so they went off down the street, and I went back to Marie Delna, and to wondering what I should be doing with my day. And thus endeth the lesson: another true operatic encounter.

I'll to the well-trod stage anon

So we all know the ironic paradox of capitalism: when you have a job you have money but no time, and when you don’t have a job, you have time but no money. Yet somehow, in my talented way, I’ve ended up with a job and no money. Ideally, that would be the other way around. Could there be some link between this state and the fact that I’ve had a month or two of being at the theater three to five nights a week? I suppose I can’t blame all my money woes on plumbing disasters and unexpected root canals. So here’s the blogging corollary to the paradox, at least for theater-goers: when you are out attending things to blog about, you don’t actually have enough time left to blog about them.

Also, I have to admit, I was glued to Dancing with the Stars on my few free evenings. I’m guessing this show is a huge hit now, since I see it cited more and more frequently as evidence that The End Is Near, which is utterly ridiculous. Salon.com had an article a couple of weeks ago about how great it is to watch your pennies in the grocery store and just generally not need things; I can see the beauty of a St Francis approach to life, but to me this article already had too much of a whiff of “poverty might be fun for a while” – and it sure can be, when it’s voluntary – and when the writer listed the hit status of DWTS as evidence of cultural decline – there was only one other example given, equally flimsy, so much so that I can’t even remember what it was – I just didn’t bother reading any further, so though the writer continued to have spiritual epiphanies while choosing the less expensive bag of dried beans, I can’t tell you what exactly her revelations were. Even Joan Acocella, whom I normally love, wrote an oddly sour and, to my mind, uncomprehending article about DWTS in a recent New Yorker. You want cultural decline? How about the inexplicable success of Madonna, who can’t sing, can’t act, can’t dance, and isn’t even very attractive? She’s the Ronald Reagan of pop. Both blights arose at the same time; both had, as their only discernable talent, a kind of genius at manipulating the always gullible media and public perceptions; and both of them had voices that made me run across the room to shut off the TV or radio. I clearly was not seeing, or was not susceptible to, whatever was charming the rest of America.

The other thing slowing me down this particular week is that I’ve finally put down the buggy whip and pushed aside the bear-grease pomade in order to install DSL on my home computer. I was assuming that my dial-up connection would work until I actually installed DSL, but as with so many assumptions, I was wrong. So I’ve had no home Internet for almost a week. I guess I can file that under “poverty might be fun – and spiritually uplifting! – for a while”, but I really just want my Internet back. And I haven't even been home to reap any spiritual benefits from all the free time I would supposedly gain, and which I would probably need to spend doing housework anyway, my abode having reached a state that even I consider disgraceful. I plan to install DSL this weekend, and then launch a YouTube orgy. Yes, if you’ve sent me a video or link to a video anytime since, oh, forever, I will at last be able to watch it. I don’t know why it takes me so long to do these things. I don’t really like gadgets and really dislike setting them up. I just don’t even know where to begin with most of them. (So big thanks once again to CMB for helping me out here.) It doesn’t help that once I actually realize it might be a good idea to read and follow the instructions, they usually turn out to be in diagram form. Last time I was forced to add staples to the copy machine, I not only cursed like a drunken sailor’s even drunker parrot, I accidentally smashed two staple cartridges before getting my third and final cartridge correctly inserted. The key was figuring out that they had four different diagrams, and I was using the wrong one. That was one of the keys, anyway. I still don’t know why they had four different diagrams. I’m just pretending the whole thing never happened.

One thing I can do is alphabetize, so you’ll notice I’ve re-arranged the blogroll. To dazzle the simple natives with my high-level skill, I ignored introductory articles while alphabetizing (so that, for example, An Unamplified Voice is under Unamplified, not An). Don’t let anyone ever tell you that a degree in English is not useful! You’ll also notice a few new blogs there, so check them out, and thanks to those bloggers for adding me. (If you link to me and I don’t know it, please let me know and I’ll add you.)

There’s I’d Rather Be Sleeping (But Opera Is Keeping Me Awake), which you can find to the right under Opera Is Keeping Me Awake. Susan is a super at the New Jersey opera and mother of a young son as well as a person with a job (I know! I get exhausted just reading about it!), and she’s a fellow Nathan Gunn fan, so there are lots of NG links, including some of those YouTube things I will finally get to see, though if I now have the capability, something even newer must be just around the bend, which I will learn to use in about five years.

Opera Tattler is another Bay Area blogger who reviews performances and their audiences, which I love, because it makes me feel I’m not just an unrecognized Louis XIV who wishes to banish all those strange beings with their rustling programs and inane whispers. I’ve occasionally thought about writing a concert review that was all about the audience noises rather than all that racket on stage: “The piece began, conventionally enough, with a tremolo effect in the lower mezzanine, though the orchestration was varied from the conventional seat-shifting and program-rustling by the addition of an amusingly pizzicato purse-zipping. After an almost concerto-like interlude for solo cellophane-wrapped hard-candy, the piece concludes with a rousing fugue for hacking cough that uses the spatial arrangements of the hall to intriguing effect. I would be remiss not to mention the fine job done by the poignant whispering chorus of possibly senile but certainly dithering gray-haired ladies. . . .” This is how I entertain myself, in lieu of punching people (or working on my anger issues). I hope audiences will behave better knowing that OT is on the QT, marking their transgressions.

Also check out a singer’s life as lived by Anne-Carolyn Bird, and don’t think I haven’t been wishing for weeks now that I could hear her sing Cunegonde at Wolf Trap. Candide is one of my favorite musicals (a term I will use here for the sake of convenience, since I’m only minimally interested in arguing what square peg fits into which round hole). I once saw a performance at the Huntington Theater in Boston in which the actor playing Candide gave such a wonderful reading of the line, “I cannot believe that I have just killed two men! I – who have a heart that is filled with love!” that my abrupt and fortissimo laugh made him, for just a split second, go out of character. One of my favorite theatrical memories, and oddly enough I've seen performances that omit the line; such is the complex textual history of Candide. . . . Anyway, you can also read about the Bhakti Project here. And you can look for her in the forthcoming recording of the Wolf Trap-commissioned Volpone, set by John Musto to Ben Jonson’s play as adapted by Mark Campbell, and don’t think that last summer I wasn’t wishing I could hear that. I checked Amazon to see if the recording was listed, but all they offered me were copies of the play and, for some reason, T-shirts from American Apparel. But from what I hear, Volpone is an outstanding addition to the admittedly small yet semi-distinguished company of Ben Jonson operas. Poor Ben Jonson! Swamped by Shakespeare even as an opera source. Maybe there’s a forthcoming version of The Alchemist or Every Man in His Humour, but somehow I think not. It’s actually difficult to find a collection of his complete plays– I haven’t managed to – and if you discount the occasional used copy of the now ancient two-volume Everyman set, with the tiny tiny type and the abbreviated speaker names (why did they ever do that?), it’s well-nigh impossible. Did Jonson foresee his fate when he wrote that WS was “not for an age, but for all time,” or did he just think to himself, “Nice phrase! Top that, dead William!” Jonson was prodigious as a sudden-springing mushroom after rain, but he’s competing with a mushroom cloud.

Please select only one! Which of the following do you consider wiser: (a) the tigers of wrath, or (b) the horses of instruction.

There are those near and dear to me who love taking personality quizzes. Me, I keep searching for choice (c), which would be does not apply, or maybe sometimes, or yes (or no) but with reservations more or less severe.

I had to take Myers-Briggs today. The results will only be revealed in a long, drawn-out session, as if reality has become a reality television results show. But I've done this before, often enough to know that "Introvert," on which I score about as high as you can go, doesn't necessarily mean shy and withdrawn; it means you are energized by solitude and drained by company, which I basically knew anyway, because being in company is all about being inundated and irradiated with nuance, and that's exhausting. Besides, sometimes people actually disagree with me! You see what I put up with.

So I'm zipping along, being dissatisfied with all the choices, but I tend to pick all the "yes, I prefer facts/the down-to-earth/reality/pre-planning" answers, because although I know I'm going to look like Mr Practical Realist Who Must Follow A Schedule, I also know what they're talking about when they talk about imagination and spontaneity: it's not William Blake enraptured in his garden, it's some way overpaid schmo who is Thinking Outside the Box As Part of the Envisioning Process. In a job long ago and far away, I had been listening to one of these blowholes gassing on about how he was going to save the world with his suggestions on how we should do our jobs which he by the way and you probably have already guessed this knew nothing about, and I finally couldn't stand it anymore and said, "Well, that's a very interesting idea, but it would require having a second [expensive piece of equipment], and right now the company won't even buy us paperclips." (That was literally the case, by the way: we were scrounging on the floor for any that might have fallen onto the carpet.) He looked at me as if he had just noticed a fly buzzing around his salad. "I'm just coming up with ideas," he said. Sweet Jesus on Sunday morning. You know, I'm not even sure I want to put up with William Blake in his garden. I'm already hyperemotional and oversensitive. Give me a midwestern farm gal anyday.

Anyway, I continue zipping along in the test today, and I hit this question:

In reading for pleasure, do you:
(a) enjoy odd or original ways of saying things, or
(b) like writers to say exactly what they mean?

Does this mean something in somebody's world? Form follows function, people: the odd or original way of saying things is the direct result of someone trying to say exactly what he or she means. What does this even mean?

Good thing I had small faith in psychologists to start with. I've been disillusioned enough already.

Go, lovely rose

Last Friday at Zellerbach I heard the West Coast premiere of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince, while surrounded by a noisy, inattentive audience – oh, not the many, many children, who were beautifully behaved, and whose joyful excitement after the show was a treat to see – just the usual moronic, rude adults who think everyone wants to hear them talking during music. There seemed many more of them than usual. The innocent open pleasure of the children versus the self-absorbed self-importance of adults is actually quite the theme in this work, and for a moment I had to consider, based on the evidence around me during the performance, whether it really is true to life. That moment didn’t last long. Most adults I know are almost too conscious of being trapped in absurd situations and pointless routines, and aren’t particularly pompous about it or proud of it. There just isn’t any way out, if you want to pay the bills and otherwise get through the day. It’s odd but maybe appropriate that a celebration of the impulses of childhood over adulthood should come at a university. As I walked through the glades on the Berkeley campus towards Sproul Plaza, I noticed each lightpole was hung with huge banners showing a photograph of a current Cal student, his or her future graduation date, and a sentence saying what the whole crazy Berkeley experience has meant to him or her. Apparently my alma mater has taught most of them that they, too, can reduce their lives to inspirational clichés. Keep on living out loud, whatever that means! Just please don’t do it while I’m trying to listen to music.

I thought I had never read The Little Prince. Now, several days after seeing it, I’m thinking maybe I did read it, though obviously it didn’t make much of an impression on me, and believe me, I was a child prone to weeping. I love children’s books and still read them (my rule of thumb for giving books to actual children: it has to be something I would consider reading myself). The Oz books were and are particular favorites. Let me commend the Beckett-like character of the Hungry Tiger (who can only be sated by eating fat babies, but who is too tender-hearted to allow himself to do so). Check out the heroic chicken Billina in Ozma of Oz. And if you want to cry at the end of a children’s book, read The Lost Princess of Oz. The harsh, hilarious dreamworld logic of those books (another obvious example is the Alice books – Amazon is finally sending me my DVD of Unsuk Chin’s new Alice opera, by the way) captures something really true to the helpless absurdity of childhood, and it echoes into the helpless absurdity of adulthood.

But I don’t think The Little Prince is a children’s book at all. It’s an adolescent’s book, and I can see that if you read it at a certain stage in your life, it will make a profound impression on you, and seem like truth, and you will remember it with deep affection, and perhaps even retain the affection if you re-read it as an adult. It speaks to that very early stage of late childhood/early adulthood when you have the troubling sense that the world is terribly wrong, but that if only people would think – or, more to the point, feel – differently, then life and the world would be different, as if the world’s troubles are a matter of perception and organization, rather than inherent faults or flaws. I don’t really respond to these books, I guess. (I was also the only one in eighth grade who hated SE Hinton's The Outsiders. Everyone else was sobbing. I thought it was sentimental and manipulative. But I kept my mouth shut and went back to reading Dostoevsky’s Idiot on my own. Supply your own joke about how popular I was.)

So I’m only guessing when I say that the opera is faithful to the book in story and spirit. That seemed to be the feeling around me (as I sometimes do, I've avoided reading reviews and reactions until I could post mine). I wonder if certain details are made clearer in the book: for instance, how the little Prince gets from planet to planet in the first half, and why he’s stuck in the desert on Earth for the whole second half. Reading the summary in the program book afterward, I gathered that the flock of cranes was moving him from planet to planet, but I still don’t know why they couldn’t move him around on Earth. I wondered why the cranes were on stage, but frankly the story is a bit disjointed anyway, and the crane chorus, like all the choruses, was lovely so I just enjoyed listening. In fact all the music is really genuinely lovely, in a melted ice cream kind of way, and maybe too relentlessly so. During the crane chorus a woman soloist does a soaring vocalise above the rest of the singers, and it’s really lovely. Then there’s another chorus later on where I think flowers are singing, and a woman representing water also does a soaring vocalise above the rest of the singers, and I might have the details wrong because it started to blur a bit, but the second time around, it was still lovely, but it didn’t seem like a deliberate echo of or reference to the earlier moment, it just seemed like a lovely effect in a perhaps fairly limited range of lovely effects. Lovely – I keep using that word, and after a while, it starts losing its force, doesn’t it?

I think the music would have been more powerful if the opera were shortened – maybe 90 minutes without intermission, as opposed to a bit over two hours with an intermission. As I said, it’s a bit disjointed. I wasn’t sure we needed all the little planets in the first half, however amusing they might be on their own. I was frankly puzzled by the planet of the Vain Man. He’s sung by the tenor Thomas Glenn, who has a really appealing reedy quality to his voice. He’s very handsome, but his face was made up so that he bore a startling resemblance to Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret and he’s dressed in an odd, bright yellow suit and hat – sort of like Jim Carrey in The Mask except completely round in the middle. Is the point supposed to be that he’s not handsome at all in any conventional sense, just hungry for attention? Glenn returns later as the Snake and does a really terrific job in modulating his voice and performance, giving a slight hiss on his sibilants and moving with the slightly jerky rhythm and menacing hooded air of a snake.

The performances are all very fine. Kenneth Kellogg has wonderful stature and a commanding voice as the King, Andrew Bidlack was poignant in different ways as the Drunkard and the Lamplighter, Marie Lenormand is a tender fox, whose hunters are also played by some of the guys I’ve just mentioned. I think the hunters and the fox are there to teach us a valuable lesson about loving, but to be honest my attention wandered a bit at that point because with a sudden rueful pang in my heart I started wishing I were at The Cunning Little Vixen instead.

Eugene Brancoveanu as the Pilot has a voice that is bright and clear without being cartoony, which also describes the sets and costumes. I assume the costumes are based on Saint-Exupery’s own illustrations to his book, so he must be responsible for the puzzling look of the Vain Man. But generally the costumes look great, except for the Rose and the other flowers, which I thought looked sort of swollen and fake. Ji Young Yang had a nice metallic quality to her voice – I’d call it sharpness but that is misleading in a musical context – that helped embody the thorny side of the Rose.

I heard Tovi Wayne as the eponymous Prince. I’m not that crazy about the white sound of boy sopranos or children’s voices generally, and the character strikes me as kind of annoying – if I were a pilot who had just crashed in the African desert, and I couldn’t fix my plane and was running out of water, I don’t think I would succumb to the tender wisdom of some weird little kid who appears out of nowhere and denounces me as a silly grown-up for trying to fix my plane and get the hell out of Dodge instead of drawing him suitable sheep; I mean, what the hell? it’s very whimsical and all, but I’d probably be thinking about the water situation – but Wayne did a nice job, and was very appealing. He was also amplified. I understand the necessity for helping a child singer in a barn like Zellerbach, singing with and against the trained operatic voices of adult men and women, and it was very well done, but it was done, and that should have been noted, I think, if only by a discreet note in the program. I realize amplification is a loaded issue in opera houses. Personally, I join those opposing it. But I can see why it might be necessary in this case, and if the house hides that, it looks as if they feel they shouldn't be doing it.

During the curtain calls Brancoveanu in a nice dad kind of way picked his Little Prince up and put him on his shoulders to receive the crowd’s applause, and when he put him down Wayne, who was probably less than half the size of the baritone, made as if to pick up Brancoveanu in his turn. Very sweet moment. Maybe more so because it felt like a truer and freer and more affectionate interaction between adult and child than the performance did – no lessons about loving, just a loving act unself-consciously performed. I wish my feelings weren’t so mixed. Lovely, and maybe too much so. Sweet, but maybe too long for the sweetness not to cloy. Childlike, but maybe tipping over into the childish too often. Anyone who loves this book would likely love the opera as well. The children in the audience really seemed thrilled, and I feel like a spoilsport even saying anything critical, but I've been to children's operas that could also be felt deeply and unreservedly by adults (for example, the ENO's staging of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel presented by SF Opera a few years ago, with its fish-headed waiters and concentration on hunger.)

The Little Prince ends with a chorus about letting your heart be your guide, though I was a little mystified by the references to the Little Prince’s laughter (if he laughed during the opera, or if his laughter was represented musically, I missed it). The chorus itself, and I’ve already mentioned how lovely the choruses in particular are, struck me as a late-blooming example of oddly Victorian uplift, though the sentiment is one that the Victorians themselves satirized. I mean, I can’t be the only one whose heart has ever misled him – right? I saw people sobbing at the end, and I was moved to well up a bit myself, while still retaining my skepticism about what the chorus was saying. Such is the strange power of music, separated from the words and sheerly as sound, to slip beneath our conscious thoughts and even our deepest constructions of the meaning of our lives and to stab us in spots where we didn’t even know we were vulnerable. But I don’t know if people were crying because of what they were feeling, or because of what they felt they could not feel.

glances backwards and forwards

"Way back when I lived in Boston I would see phonepole flyers for a group called Relentless Cookout – I never heard them, but the name stuck with me."

I remember writing that, but I couldn’t find it again when I recently made the attempt. I was looking for it because John Flaherty quoted it back to me in an e-mail with a link to Relentless Cookout’s Myspace page, and I salute his research skills. As he said, here’s my chance. For reasons too complicated (and tedious and embarrassing) to go into, I can’t really access all these crazy Myspace/YouTube sites that all you kids are grooving to these days, but I hope to change that soon. In the meantime, enjoy. I probably would have back in the day, since I used to listen to New Wave and indie stuff before I turned my back on rock/pop/whatever, at least insofar as one can turn one’s back on it in our society (you know, if you tell most people you hate God they’ll smile and nod – I mean, He sure has a lot to answer for, am I right? – but if you tell them you hate rock and roll they get really angry, with the disgusted contempt of a Republican faced with the Constitution). But I’ve opened up a bit, and am ready to accept Relentless Cookout into my heart.

When I googled the name (partly in an attempt to find where exactly I had written about them) I got their official yet skimpy website, which said that the group was often listed among bands with unusual or bad names. Unusual, perhaps, but bad – au contraire! It was the name that’s stuck in my mind all these years, conjuring up a brutal death march of enforced suburban fun the wryly cynical assessment of which seemed a basic part of New Wave. So check them out, perhaps at an upcoming Memorial Day barbecue, and enjoy that long-awaited three-day weekend!


And ChiChi Fargo, who sent me the link to LHL's Elmer Gantry aria, has posted another YouTube video, this time of Philip Glass’s The Juniper Tree, which ART did back in 1985, so it’s nice to see the precious musical flotsam and jetsam of my Boston past bobbing up and down on the vast and murky waters of the Intertubes. Check it out here. So I guess I shouldn’t give up hope that the other Glass chamber opera I saw at ART, The Fall of the House of Usher, will also show up someday. I liked both of them a lot, but as with anything very stylized, lots of people didn’t. I worked with a woman who announced (about the Fall of the House of Usher), “It made me laugh – I guess I’m just not smart enough to get it” in tones that clearly indicated I was supposed to feel that she certainly was smart enough, and if she didn't get it, it wasn't worth getting. I smiled vaguely, since I suddenly realized she was not, in fact, smart enough to get it, or at least receptive enough to the outré to appreciate it. I was just grateful my enjoyment wasn’t ruined by her moronic snickering. Look, lots of people hate Philip Glass (and Edgar Allan Poe), finding what they do too boring or repetitive or just plain whacked-out messed-up Gothic weird (well, that applies to Poe more than Glass), but that’s no reason to annoy other people with one’s ostentatious displeasure.

But people are so resistant to any change. Part of the big Boston/NYC trip I couldn’t take was going to involve going to Nathan and Julie Gunn’s Zankel Hall recital, a meditation on the monastic life that involved a dancer and video projections as well as solo piano and vocals. Since I didn’t get a chance to see it myself I obviously can’t say whether I thought the evening was successful, and I should make it clear that I respect the opinion of those who were there and found it baffling or unsuccessful. What surprised me about some of the confusion, especially given that some of these reactions were on a fansite dedicated to Nathan Gunn so you’d think people would have enough trust in his artistic judgment to give him the benefit of the doubt, was the edge of contemptuous anger in some of the assessments. I thought about responding, but since I hadn’t been there I would be urging a theoretical openness and a nuanced reaction to people who clearly felt kind of threatened by the whole thing. It was getting a little too Opera-L in there, so I let it go and just hope I’ll get a chance to see the program some other time.

I’m missing lots of great stuff, in fact, and not just the new Harbison symphony in Boston that Gunn was also performing that week. There’s Satyagraha. Yes, I like Philip Glass, which is sort of odd considering that one reason I stopped listening to rock is that the steady monotonous thumping bass just drives me crazy. Glass doesn’t affect me that way, go figure. And I see that Lee Hoiby’s Tempest was presented at Purchase College in New York in a newly revised version. I have met people who swear this is one of the great American operas. I would love to see this in a season that also included Ades’s version of the same play as well as Harbison’s version of The Winter’s Tale. (Has someone done Cymbeline and Pericles, just to round out a season of the Romances?) I’d buy tickets to that, even though on the whole, and with the exceptions of Britten’s Midsummer and Verdi’s Falstaff, I usually have very mixed feelings about operas based on Shakespeare. The omission of Verdi’s Otello from the short list of exceptions is not accidental. Much as I love Verdi, I can only admire Otello coldly. You will sometimes hear people say it’s “better” than Shakespeare’s, and usually I’m very laissez faire about people’s tastes and opinions, but they’re wrong. Just wrong. If you ask them what they mean by “better” they’ll tell you that the plot is tighter and the motivation clearer and the action less diffuse, but that’s exactly why I prefer the messy, murky stage play.

Here’s something else I’m missing, this very week: the premiere of Kirke Mechem’s opera on John Brown at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, starring the redoubtable James Maddelena. I’m planning on buying a ticket to The Bonesetter’s Daughter here in San Francisco, but is it wrong to admit my anticipation is pretty lukewarm, and I’d rather see John Brown? Besides, I hear tell that Kansas City is a beautiful city of many fountains, and I'd love to see the Royals in their home stadium since they are the Brigadoon of baseball teams ("Who are the A's playing? The Royals? Oh, yeah – I forgot they exist!") Nonetheless, I take what I can get, and will head off to the Bonesetter's Daughter this fall, and as with any evening at the theater, I will walk in prepared to be converted. I am occasionally wrong, especially when I’ve formed opinions based on airy nothings. It happens. I freely admit it.

There is some stuff I’m actually going to, since yesterday’s announcement by the SF Ballet pretty much closed out the Announcing-Next-Season season, which is sometimes more entertaining than the actual seasons. As previously noted, I have not renewed my subscription at the Opera (by the way: subscriber and donor since 1992, and absolutely no one from the Opera has contacted me to find out why I haven’t renewed, not that I’m keeping track or anything; far be it from me to begrudge anyone the rare opportunity to see a live performance of La Boheme or La Traviata, but I’m not ponying up for that, and I’m certainly not donating – that would only encourage them).

Cal Performances did drag me back in, spending more money than ever, though I’d first like to note how unbelievably offensive it is that tickets to the Yo-Yo Ma concert are only available to those who have donated at least $1200. Why rub our grimy, impoverished faces in our miserable lot by putting this in the brochure in the first place? If the motive is to make us look at that big pile of cash sitting on the dining room table taking up space and just grab it all up and send it off to Cal Performances because you’ve been meaning to tidy up anyway, they have miscalculated. I’m thinking instead that there might not be any point in giving them any money at all unless you’re starting at $1200. So, Cal Performances – please stop yapping about reaching out to new audiences and being inclusive when you’re so very clearly selling exclusivity. But what can I say? They’re bringing Mark Morris back twice, with the new Romeo and Juliet and the old L’Allegro, which is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on stage. Plus Dawn Upshaw is back, this time in the Peter Sellars staging of Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments. There’s bunches of other stuff, including a meatier theater selection than they often have, but this is the stuff floating to the surface for me.

What floats to the surface with San Francisco Performances is their Elliott Carter weekend: the fabulous Pacifica Quartet returns with his complete string quartets, and keyboard goddess Ursula Oppens plays the complete piano music, along with lectures by Robert Greenberg – at least, that’s my memory of what’s being offered. Their brochures are still stuck at the printer. They present great stuff, but they do seem to run into these odd problems.

The Ballet is offering a Mark Morris evening, and a new Swan Lake. I love Swan Lake. You know all those oddly self-sacrificing women in nineteenth-century opera, who redeem (whatever that means in this context) the hero by jumping into the sea or off a cliff or otherwise immolating themselves? Here’s one work where the guy does it. Score one (and yeah, it does seem to be only one, unless someone can augment my memory or my knowledge) for the ladies. Anyway, I'm happy to see another Swan Lake, though I’m sure there are balletomanes who feel about it the way I do about Boheme. Maybe not, though – the classical ballet crowd seems to be even more self-contained than the opera crowd.

I was hoping to spend some of those evenings when I was discouraging Gockley’s regrettable season by boycotting Boheme in reading Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, The Original of Laura, which his son has finally decided to publish. Nabokov, the perfectionist arranger of each lustrous detail, wanted the manuscript destroyed when he realized he would die before completing it to his satisfaction. Faced with the wrenching decision of physically destroying his father’s last work or leaving it for some ambitious Associate Professors to fight over, the son chose to publish. I thought the announcement meant that the book was imminently available, so I went on Amazon.com and searched for The Original of Laura. Their first offering was Stop Whining, Start Living by Dr Laura Schlessinger. Uh,