Arias, Yes! Whole Operas, No!

A friend of mine, Gay Glennon, stopped by for lunch a few weeks back en route to visit her brother in Columbus. Somehow in our conversation, we started talking about our musical likes and dislikes and I told her that though I love countless arias –such absolutely beautiful music so exquisitely done—I have a general aversion to watching or listening to whole operas. Which I do. Big Time.

She left but a week later sent me an email urging me to see the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. She was especially enamored of the use of puppets in it.

I said I’d do it. I did it, and here was my reaction, expressed first in an email to Gay and then in a subsequent exchange with another opera lover friend, Jane Metzger, who in the 80s was Mrs. Lovett to my Sweeney Todd and with whom, and her husband Paul, Esther and traveled more than once to the lovely Glimmerglass Opera House in Cooperstown NY to see a couple of operas, Jonathan Miller’s staging of La Boheme (featured in the NY Times) and Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the few operas extant with a countertenor lead role. Let me cut the chase. I didn’t like either performance, nor did I enjoy watching Carmen as a kid whenthe Met traveling company performed it in Cleveland. (I did think Rise Stevens was hot.) Nor did I like the opera whose name I forget but Renata Tebaldi had the lead role that Esther and I saw in the very early years of our marriage. Nor –I’m going for full disclosure here—did I greatly enjoy my experience singing one comic aria in Weber’s Der Freischutze (The Magic Bullet) in college –an opera as silly as any that ever existed.

I did however enjoy singing the role of Peachum, “king of the thieved,” in Brecht and Weill’s (and Blitzstein’s) The Threepenny Opera. But that’s almost an anti-opera.

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Anyway, I went to the simulcast and here’s what I wrote afterwards to Gay, with copies to all my friends who are seriously music-minded because I thought it might spark an exchange.

Saturday, Nov. 9, 2019: Per your urging, Gay, I saw the Met simulcast of the live performance of Mme Butterflythis afternoon. We’ll talk later but here’s my initial reaction to it.

Beautiful staging and concept but static acting. It offered not dramatic interaction but a sequence of tableaux, which to be frank, drove me nuts.

Big slabs of meat as actors. And no way was Mme B. fifteen, though at least she was less thick around the middle than any of the other principals. [I understand why opera singers have thicker middles than most. Opera singing is the most demanding of any kind of singing –with the possible addition of the vocal gymnastics of a singing ensemble like Roomful of Teeth– and singing opera requires building up the diaphragm and singing muscles all through the torso. As such, it’s not a trade for sylphs.]

Fucking horrible acting! The consul did the stock gesture of all singers who don’t know what to do with their hands: he put one hand in his pocket and gestured with the other one. I did that when I was twenty! It’s embarrassing to think of it now. When I came back to acting and singing after sixteen years away from it completely, I had an epiphany: I realized that acting is interacting, not gesturing. It’s reacting to people on stage with you at the time. None of the principals in this performance could act worth a darn.

Another problem, endemic to 19th century operas, is fill. There were long passages of interaction between two or three of the principals on stage saying basically nothing new. Especially, at the end of act one –it was beautiful music but boring as meaning.

As to the voices, all were pretty good but Mme B was sour at the start, probably a quarter tone below pitch. She got better as she progressed. But god, her arm gestures were horrible. (A side bar: why is it that the absolute best musical portrayal of Porgy in Gershwin’s folk opera is Louis Armstrong, whose voice was limited and sounded almost worn out? It’s because he communicated better than more robust voiced opera singers and because his voice and manner matched up with the character he played —who wasn’t no opera singer.)

I really dislike opera acting. It’s programmatic and stiff, and even the strong gestures, for instance Butterfly slapping and hitting and when she falls down in a swoon, are half delivered.

Pinkerton had a good voice but he was puffy and stiff. The consul kept one hand in his pocket for a third of the time, which is a rank amateur’s mistake. Mme B was way too old for the character she supposedly played. Mme B’s maid, Suzuki?, was distressingly not Asian.

On the good side, the colors, lights and perspectives, the people moving in and over the rise in the back were superb. The phantom carriers. The puppets were brilliant and moving, especially Mme B’s little child. Very moving.

As to the music: it was gorgeous but much of it superfluous to the spoken and dramatic meaning.

If I’d been asked to applaud at the end, I would have clapped like mad for the puppeteers and modestly so for the principal singers. But nothing ecstatic.

So I don’t think I’ve changed my stance on opera. The music is often beautiful, beautiful, and there are great opportunities for staging and lighting, but the acting is shit, it’s tableaux instead of interaction, and there’s way too much fill (slack) n the music/libretto portion.

As play and a performance, this staging of Mme B. sucked, in my opinion.

***

My friend Orin Domenico, savvy on most kinds of music, wrote back and pretty much agreed with me.

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Then Jane Metzger, who was Mrs. Lovett to my Sweeney Todd in the mid-eighties, wrote me:

I have to agree with you. The acting was pretty awful. One REALLY had to suspend one’s disbelief to accept Butterfly as 15. Obviously no real 15 year old could sing the role, but someone more appropriate could have been cast. It’s further hard to believe that anyone that age could, in their wildest dreams, have been madly in love with THAT Pinkerton. Obviously that was excusable. [The actor was a last-minute replacement and had two days to prepare for the part.) I hope we’ll see him again in something more appropriate as I did really like his voice. With a 2-day notice he was lucky to even get through it.

In one sense I agree with you that the staging, the set and lighting and especially the puppetry was magical as well as beautifully executed, however perhaps it put the focus in the wrong place. It seems that maybe the director got so caught up in all the technical stuff that he lost sight of the actor singers. It was easy to do as technically it was wonderful. Maybe that part of the problem.

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I wrote back to Jane, summarizing my points about staged opera.

Jane, I agree with everything you say. My complaints about watching a whole opera have to do with four things:

sometimes over silly plots;
long stretches of vocal fill, where the dramatic quality of the (sung) dialogue is inferior;
actors who look dramatically unlike the characters they are portraying; and
biggest of all, stiff and wooden, *uncommitted* acting, which moves staged interaction away from real exchange to static tableaux , however gorgeous the sound may be that issues from them.

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Jane’s response: To me all of the plots are inane. If the music is good all is forgiven. Your 4th point has to be somewhat overlooked in this case as there was no time to build any kind of rapport between the leads. He must have been terrified. However in most cases I would certainly agree. Oops have to run. We are celebrating Nov. birthdays today. Can’t miss that.

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There are operas I’ve enjoyed listening to in their entirety on record, but not ,many. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. (I have two versions of it.) His The Fairy Queen. (Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings on it!) Rameau’s Pygmalion. I suspect too I might enjoy all of Tosca, I love the arias so.

But still, I think opera is a flawed (though exciting) medium, too much fish to be all fowl.

***

Then my acquaintance, friend by email only, Roger Brunyate weighed in. Roger’s the real thing, with a long, distinguished career staging and directing opera. That doesn’t mean I always agree with his judgments but I take them seriously.

Here’s Roger:

Hi David, Although I have a subscription, I sat out this Butterfly because I don’t much like the opera and the promo the previous week featuring the middle-aged soprano had a decidedly anti-promotional effect on me. But I do admire that production.

Nevertheless, opera is my business, and I mostly disagree with your blanket condemnation.

What you may not realize (or perhaps you do), is that opera casts only get to work with the original director in the production’s premiere, or for a very special revival. There are house directors, of course (I used to be one), responsible for slotting every change of cast into an existing production, and they work conscientiously and hard. But for the most part—and especially with operas that everyone has done many times before—they have no more than a couple of days to put it together. So the kind of acting that you are talking about, that comes about through weeks of work between singer and director, is seldom to be found in these warhorses. And the warhorsier the thing is, the more likely that singers will be cast for vocal prowess alone.

Also, a company has to be willing to challenge performers and audiences alike. Take a look at this five-minute trailer for Dvorak’s “little mermaid” opera Rusalka, and see if there is not some serious drama going on. See it at the Met, and all you get is a pretty fairytale.

https://youtu.be/lo6pBtV4y9Y. (Munich)

https://youtu.be/0MMstqMT3kc (Met, for comparison; same singer)

As ever, Roger.

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I wrote back (my response is slightly edited for length):

Thanks, Roger. I was hoping you’d respond because you are one of the few people whose judgment I trust on these matters. And I will be going to see the simulcasts again, notably Woyzzeck in January and Joyce Di Donato in I forget what later on because I like the dramatic quality of her voice on records.

My opinion is also influenced by my experience playing Peachum in a production of The Threepenny Opera in the 90s. I was the only principal to come from a background in acting as opposed to singing. The others –mostly young in their defense– seemed to think you could act a script like they learned to sing one: you practiced the music and lines all on your own time and then convened to put it as little time and effort as possible in on-stage group rehearsal.

If one is called on to act a role, I expect acting. And, as is apparent in my remarks, tableaux don’t cut it for me. I also get restless with stretches where the quality or dramatic impact of the words being sung are basically fill in. There were long stretches of that in Butterfly –beautiful singing, mundane dialogue.

Acting, good acting, should be lean, as should the book it’s done from.

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Again from Roger:

I will be interested to hear your opinion of Wozzeck (no Y in the opera version). It was well reviewed in Salzburg, but I find that William Kentridge’s technique of placing his singers in the middle of projected animations tends to dehumanize them. In Wo[y]zzeck, of course, there is a dialectic between humanity and institutional dehumanization. If Kentridge can stay in synch with that, the result could be illuminating, but I didn’t feel he achieved this illumination with his recent Lulu.

Until then, yours as ever, Roger.

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And lastly from Roger and me back to him:

Dear David, But opera acting cannot be like stage acting, because a score is not a play; the composer controls time, the playwright doesn’t.

Think of Handel or Mozart. You may think the convention of recitative/aria hopelessly old-fashioned, but it serves a purpose. To utter words in an intelligent manner and to do things in ways that we recognize, you have got to have at least part of the drama take place in natural clock time, as it would in a play. But composers work by taking control of time, stopping the clock, making the tempo faster than normal or more frequently slower. This paradigm is obvious in an 18th-century opera, but it is built into the form, and applies even to operas of the present day, if you look.

So in training an operatic singing actor (which used to be my job), you have certainly got to give him or her the tools of a straight actor. But you also need to train people to sustain intensity and focus over sometimes long stretches where the clock is no longer moving at normal speed, often because the music has taken over entirely. The Method won’t cut it at such times, though the principle of total immersion in a role very much still holds. Very few artists achieve this—my own graduates, alas, included.

But some do. Here is the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor sung by Lisette Oropesa in a production from Madrid by David Alden. My class all reacted negatively to the grey scenery—it is played in some kind of deserted institution—so you can’t say that the production is carrying the load, as it did with Madama Butterfly. But Alden and Oropesa between them have created an unusually young (mid teen) Lucia, abused and vulnerable, locked up in her own fantasy world even before she goes murderously mad. The scene itself is surely the epitome of musical artificiality, yet so complete is Oropesa’s immersion that it is totally mesmerizing.

https://youtu.be/LJu7p6uJmwk

That’s three clips now that I’ve sent. I do hope you can watch them (under half an hour for all three), and respond specifically.

As ever, Roger.

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And me back:

I understand what you’re saying and I might be why I greatly like the two semi-operas by Purcell and the one by Rameau that I have on CD. But with the nineteenth century, opera moves to drama, and drama means you act, not just sing. Its not Method that is at stake, but interaction and verity. When a singer can immerse herself or himself, it works. When not, the effect is embarrassing to me. More than that, acting is crucial to me. If you don’t act wholeheartedly, I want to know the reason why.

So, from the nineteenth century on, with geniuses like Puccini writing, I disagree. For many though out all operas henceforth, the score is if not a play, then parallel to a play, and from the audience’s standpoint, what is being sung and acted out is indeed a play.

Acting can no longer be secondary to singing.

With respect and appreciation,

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From Stan State colleague Linda Sarhad:

This interests me: I’ve spent much of this year learning to write libretto. Deborah Kavasch and I were commissioned to create a “training” opera for young singers, ages 15-22, in the Opera Modesto (formerly Townsend) Summer Opera Institute. We’ve been working with a mashup of Aesop’s fables.

From my notes: Great moments in opera arise when the music alone gets to tell the story.

The holes in the libretto allow the magic of opera.

But I completely agree with you about the frequently poor acting, the “dead” places when not much is happening plot-wise. If opera presumes to incorporate drama with music, it should pay more attention to the drama side.

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One more from Roger, then me, then out:

Dear David, At least we have found out that we admire the same things! Intensity of involvement is something that I would not quarrel with at all, as it covers also those moments when something different from straight-play acting is required.

But you are wrong to think that, from the 19th century onwards, opera always approximates to a play. The oscillation between music-dominant and drama-dominant is built into the DNA; opera does not work without it. The distinction between aria and recitative may not be so obvious as with Mozart, but look carefully at any score, and it is not hard to tell who is in control of the clock at any given time: dramatist or composer.

As ever, Roger

***

This has been a helpful exchange for me. I understand what both Roger and Linda say. Furthermore, I understand every opera is not principally a play but a vehicle for dramatized music.

But opera is almost always more than music, voices, set, and set pieces, and if the composer and librettist tell a story, they have a dramatist’s obligation to tell it well, and the performers an obligation to act it well along with singing it well.

And with that, this blog entry is finished.

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