Opera Starved: The Berlusconi Effect

I've just read Alex Ross's downbeat report on the "lean season" of opera performances this summer in Berlusconi's Italy (The New Yorker, July 25, 2011). Ross laments the Italian government's "indifference, if not outright contempt, toward opera and other traditional genres." Apparently the sharp slash in government funding is having a visibly depressing effect on productions throughout the country and creating a widespread sense of insecurity in the Italian opera world. Sad, sad news, ameliorated only by Ross's nice account of Ricardo Muti's protest at La Scala, a modest success story that should be widely read.

Of all the performances Ross attended, only Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea at Florence's Maggio Musicale seemed to impress him. The production had a "well-fed look" and "a degree of international glamour missing from other events." This he attributes to the participation of Susan Graham and "a lustrous cast," but also to the members of Alan Curtis's ensemble Il Complesso Barocco. What especially delighted me was the parenthetical aside in which Ross gives a tip of the hat to Donna Leon, the best-selling writer of Guido Brunetti mysteries. For years, she has been the generous patron of what Ross calls "Curtis's high-class Baroque ventures." Thus, in a season of starvation, a crime writer's royalties came to the rescue. Brava for Leon!

Ross's comments on the Monteverdi opera reminded me of the memorable Jonathan Miller production of Poppea that I saw at Glimmerglass in the summer of 1994. Though Glimmerglass provides none of the "historical resonances" Ross experienced while seeing the opera in Florence, the Cooperstown setting and country opera house had their own unique, if ahistorical, pleasures for me. As for the production itself, the counter-tenors David Daniels (as Nero) and Brian Asawa (as Ottone) both gave stunning performances, as did the brilliant original instrument orchestra, led by the energetic Jane Glover.

Partenope Redux?

This spring, Handel's extraordinary Partenope will once again be performed at the New York City Opera. My question is: which version? I know that Francisco Negrin, the talented director, has staged at least two different versions of the opera. The first, which debuted at Glimmerglass in July 1998, was an impressive and revelatory production that subsequently traveled to the NYCO in September of that year. But in the fall of 2008, Negrin directed another rather different version for the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Exegette was fortunate enough to see (and enjoy) both the Glimmerglass and the Danish productions (and was impelled to write a few enthusiastic words about the marvelous Copenhagen staging in a blog entry that year). So one wonders whether this year's NYCO production will be Partenope I or Partenope II. Or has the imaginative Negrin prepared yet another version for NYCO's audience this time around-- a Partenope III?

What's Doubly Wrong With Pinchuk's Prize?

I can't resist including in my own blog a link to the following excellent post by Judith H. Dobrzynski in her ArtsJournal blog Real Clear Arts:
What's Wrong With This New Prize? A Lot. - Real Clear Arts

I, too, am dismayed that no women seem to be included in the advisory panel that will help Victor Pinchuk select winners for his extravagant new prize for young artists. But I'm perhaps even more depressed by the sorry group of "older generation" male artists selected as "mentors" for the younger generation. (For details, see Carol Vogel's column in the Dec. 7th issue of the NY Times.)

From Gansevoort to Istanbul: Architecture on View

I've just had two great architecture experiences! First, a marvelous walk on New York's own Promenade Plantée-- the new High Line. Ambling along the recently opened section from Gansevoort Street, in the Meatpacking district, to West 20th Street in Chelsea, I kept an eye on my copy of Justin Davidson's handy illustrated tour of the architectural surroundings (it appeared in the June 15-22 issue of New York magazine). I already knew, of course, that the formerly bleak, far-west section of Manhattan was rapidly being developed, but I was nevertheless surprised by how many sleek new towers have recently come up and/or are still in the process of being built.

From the excellent vantage point of the High Line, the city seems fresh and flourishing. Yet New York's history hasn't completely vanished. The elevated view offers exciting contrasts between the new buildings, with their glittering panes of glass and steel, and rusty remnants of the industrial past. The latter consist of atmospheric, desolate shells of deserted structures and the remains of the old elevated track. The worn railroad ties have been made newly elegant with wonderful plantings based on those that had actually sprung up there over years of desuetude. As for the bright new buildings, naturally they vary in quality. To me, the most innovative and exciting so far are Frank Gehry's IAC Building and two in-the-works structures, Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue and Neil Denari's HL23.

The second experience was virtual-- its source the striking settings of Tom Tykwer's movie The International. In a feature included with the DVD version, Tykwer makes an unusual claim: he conceived of architecture as a character in his film. And, in fact, after the intensity of Clive Owens's performance and the dizzying switches in geographic locations, the film's array of architectural backgrounds may be its most interesting aspect. Here are some of them:

1) Gunter Henn's Volkswagen Customer Center at the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany. As the headquarters of ICCB, the villainous bank that is the central subject of the film, Tykwer and his production manager Uli Hanisch wanted a huge ultramodern structure-- a building that in its size would seem to reduce to insignificance the Interpol agent (played by Owens) who tries unsuccessfully to bring the bank down. They convinced the VW corporation to allow them to shoot the movie in the giant rectangular building that sits on a hill and dominates the Autostadt. Tykwer liked the building's "fake transparency"-- all that glass, with its suggestion of openness, but sinister stuff going on inside that nobody knows about!

2) Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The museum is the amazing setting for a murderous, let-all-hell-break-loose chase and shoot-out. Obviously Tykwer and crew couldn't decimate the real Guggenheim, so they created a convincing replica in an unused factory site in Babelsburg. They even "installed" a video exhibition (by the artist Julian Rosefeldt) to add to the lifelike quality of the museum's interior.

3) Gio Ponti's Pirelli Tower in Milan. The classic modern building is juxtaposed against the Neo-Classicism of the city's monstrous Mussolini-period Main Station. A political rally unfolds in the open square between the two buildings. The campaigner, who is also head of "Calvini Defense," is assassinated by a sharp-shooter positioned in the Tower.

4) Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Center. This curved concrete building, raised above the ground on a series of cone-like stilts, is actually another structure from the Wolfsburg Autostadt. It was magically transposed by the filmmakers to a lovely lakeside site in the Lago Iseo, Italy. There it functions as the headquarters for the above-mentioned Calvini Defense corporation, and becomes the site for a cat-and-mouse chase.

5) Berlin architecture provides a host of new versus old oppositions, a theme the director likes. The film's first scene and first murder take place in front of the city's sparkling new Hauptbahnhof. Not long thereafter, the Central Station's modernity is contrasted with Berlin's venerable Alte Nationalgalerie. Inside the museum, in one of its placid galleries, ICCB's assassin is quietly given his next business-like assignment in murder.

6) Istanbul's ancient Grand Bazaar is The International's final locale, and the site of its nihilistic conclusion. First, though, there is another chase-- this one through the crowded and colorful marketplace. Then, up on the roof of the Bazaar, a tense mano a mano between Louis Salinger, our Interpol hero, and Jonas Skarssen, the elusive head of the evil bank. It's in this dramatic setting that Skarssen is finally trapped and murdered. But, alas-- as we and Salinger know-- that death, though cinematically inevitable, is futile. Any number of other equally pragmatic bankers are eagerly waiting in the wings, ready to take Skarssen's place. The ICCB goes on...

Parricide and the Flapper from Hell: Part 2

After writing about Claude Chabrol's ambiguous portrayal of Violette Noziere (see Part 1, my previous post), I found it revelatory to compare the filmmaker's treatment with the Surrealist group's ardent defense of the real-life parricide. It was Peter Read's interesting review of Jonathan Eburne's Surrealism and the Art of Crime (TLS, July 3, 2009) that drew my attention to the Surrealists' view of Noziere, and all quotes below are from Read's article.

Chabrol's film, appearing 45 years after the crime, satirized the self-righteous moralism of the press and the blatant sensationalizing of the case, but also coolly depicted French reactions to Noziere as divided and diverse. The Surrealists, on the other hand, reacting in the heat of the event, perceived the venomous public reaction as a unified assault on a pathetic victim of a corrupt social order. The press and commentators of every political position had seemingly all joined together in their hostility to Noziere. The entire French public regarded her as a threat to family, society and church; they attacked her as "the woman who had killed her father and then sullied his memory." Her act of poisoning was thus "a double parricide, committed by a heartless hedonist seeking a premature inheritance, a 'flapper from hell' who had destroyed a unionized railway worker."

For their part, the Surrealists were outraged by French society's condemnation of Violette. They saw her crime as hypocritically juxtaposed against some idealized bourgeois notion of family life, whereas the young woman had actually come from a dysfunctional family, one within which she had been oppressed, abused and raped. The Surrealists presented their defense in a collective publication containing work by eight writers (Breton, Peret, Char and Eluard among them) and nine artists (Arp, Bellmer, Dali, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Man Ray and Tanguy). They cited suppressed evidence in the case (a sperm-soaked rag and the father's pornographic drawings) and denounced the legal judgement against Violette as "a patriarchal conspiracy masquerading as justice." The pamphlet was published in 1933 in Belgium and promptly thereafter banned in France, where it was considered almost as scandalous as the parricide itself.

The Surrealists exploited the subjects of crime and criminals, and their representation in the media, as a means of addressing social and aesthetic problems. Noziere was only one of a group of murderers who elicited their interest and sympathy. Others were Henri Desire Landru, the notorious serial killer who displayed a "witty insolence" in court (and was, incidentally, the subject of another Chabrol film); Germaine Berton, the militant anarchist who murdered the anti-Semitic royalist Marius Plateau of the reactionary Action francaise (though she'd planned to assassinate either Charles Maurras or Leon Daudet); the Papin sisters, oppressed domestic servants who blinded and murdered their employer and her daughter (and inspired Jean Genet's play The Maids).

In mock-serious defense of the killer Landru, Surrealist Benjamin Peret solemnly asserted that criminals should be judged according to the degree of their creativity, the amount of imagination they deployed, the "artfulness" of their crimes. Those displaying sufficient subtlety and sophistication, as opposed to "everyday barbarity," were the kind that deserved approval. Read characterizes Peret's argument as "ostensibly irresponsible" but "perversely subversive in its opposition to the predominant journalistic modes of voyeuristic sensationalism and moralism."

Less ironically, the Surrealists defended certain crimes as powerful psychological reactions against a corrupt social order and bourgeois hypocrisy. Noziere's poisoning of a father who had molested her since she was twelve years old was an explicable outburst of rage against abuse-- and a legitimate form of self-defense. But cases like Noziere's also revealed "a deeply oppressive social malady," dark underground fissures in society's fabric; Noziere's crime, along with others, thus had political as well as psychological ramifications. Such anti-social acts were already (in the late 1920s and early 1930s) seen by the Surrealists as critiques of the mores of fascism. The underlying social conditions they revealed were predictive of events to come, incipient symptoms of disease that would later fully mature "when the Vichy regime enacted its own vicious version of normative, anti-Semitic and patriarchal values."

Enlarging on this idea, Read suggests a broader political context for the Surrealist attitude towards criminals and crime. His essay begins and ends with seemingly inapposite but in fact relevant references to an important event in turn-of-the-century French history-- the Dreyfus Affair. He finds that harrowing case relevant here because of its long-lasting aftereffect. The wrongly condemned Dreyfus was, of course, finally freed and "justice was served, but the affair left the reputation of the French judiciary and other institutions seriously damaged." French society after Dreyfus remained "split down the middle." On one side, the patriotic, conservative anti-Dreyfusards, who represented rigid, anti-Semitic, patriarchal standards. On the other side were those disaffected members of society, among them French intellectuals and the Surrealists, who had a growing sympathy for "anarchists, renegades and outlaws" and who were inclined to systematically reverse society's judgements. "It would then be more apparent," concludes Read, "that the Vichy regime, whose values the Surrealists were already contesting in the 1920s and 30s, constituted a return to power of the anti-Dreyfusards, who during the Occupation achieved a late and effective revenge over their historic adversaries."

Chabrol does not make that political leap between Violette's case and the Vichy regime's morality, but he does make explicit reference to perverted Petainist values in a subsequent film, the 1988 Une Affaire des Femmes, in which Isabelle Huppert is again his heroine-- this time not as a parricide, but as an illegal abortionist who is guillotined for her "crimes" against family, church and state.

Parricide and the Flapper from Hell: Part 1

Having just the other day seen Claude Chabrol's 1978 film Violette (via DVD and the wonderful Netflix), I was surprised and amused last night to read an account of the defense mounted by Andre Breton and his Surrealist cohorts of the real-life parricide Violette Noziere, the French woman whose crimes in the early 1930s were the inspiration for Chabrol's movie. I came upon it in the most recent issue of TLS to reach me-- part of a review by Peter Read of Jonathan P. Eburne's Surrealism and the Art of Crime. I was tickled by the coincidence, and reminded of how the Surrealists themselves loved the haphazard, the contingent, the fortuitous.

So, herewith, in Part 1, some random comments on Chabrol's film. In my next post, Part 2, the Surrealists on the Noziere case and other crimes.

Part 1. Chabrol's Violette, portrayed brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert, is several years younger than the actual Noziere, who was eighteen at the time of her crime. Though Chabrol embroiders and enhances the Noziere story, and adds to it an elusive atmosphere of ambiguity, he generally follows fairly closely the facts of the case.

The teenage daughter of a proper lower middle-class couple, Violette lives a cramped existence in a tiny claustrophobic tenement. At home, she is well-behaved and virginal-- a typical though somewhat dour and buttoned-up schoolgirl, always busy with homework. But in fact she has been leading a double life as a quasi-prostitute. After her parents are asleep, she slips out of her bedroom, changes into flashy clothes, puts on heavy makeup, and goes into seedy neighborhoods in search of romance, i.e., of men with whom to bed.

Two events interrupt this pattern-- first, Violette discovers that she has syphilis. Frightened that her parents will learn the truth, she pressures her doctor to tell them the disease is inherited-- one of them must be the carrier-- and that she is still a virgin. The second development is Violette's fateful encounter with Jean Dabin, a good-looking scoundrel with whom she falls hopelessly in love. Dabin turns out to be a leech. To meet his constant demands for money and to keep him in style, Violette uses her earnings as a prostitute. She also begins to steal petty amounts from her parents without their knowledge.

As Dabin's requirements increase, Violette seeks other sources of money. She tries unsuccessfully to break into her parents' cache of savings, stored under lock and key in the apartment. When it is clear that Dabin will leave her if she can't come up with more cash, Violette plots to murder both her mother and father. The syphilis story conveniently provides a method. Violette forges a letter from her doctor indicating that the whole family should take the syphilis medication. The parents, humiliated by the possibility that they are the source of Violette's infection, agree to take the medicine and are promptly fed poisonous powders by their daughter. To finish off the job and disguise the cause of death, Violette turns on the gas in the apartment and leaves.

Her plan, however, goes awry. Though Violette's father dies immediately, her mother survives, recovers, and provides testimony against her daughter. Meanwhile, Violette has gone into hiding. When she is inevitably caught and arrested, she has her defense ready. She claims that she was a victim of her father's abuse, that he had regularly raped her, and that the only reason she tried to kill her mother was to spare her the shame of knowing about her husband's guilt.

The case is sensational and widely exploited by the press. Screaming headlines pop up everywhere. The public is fascinated and divided. Partisan groups form for and against the parricide. Conflicting theses for the crime are expounded in public forums. Noziere becomes a cause celebre for feminists and the Surrealists. When the case comes to trial, Violette's mother, changing her position, begs that her daughter be spared. Violette is nevertheless condemned to death. We learn from the film's coda that the sentence for the real-life Noziere was subsequently changed to life imprisonment, then shortened. Years later she was pardoned and set free earlier than expected. She married the son of an official at the prison where she had been incarcerated, had five children, and was even reconciled with her mother.

Both visually and in its use of a broken narrative line, Chabrol's treatment of Violette's story is uneasy and equivocal. It's never apparent whether he wishes us to admire or condemn his icy heroine. Perhaps we are meant to do neither, or to do both simultaneously. Violette's sexual escapades, in deep blacks and dull greys, are sometimes viewed as glamorous, but also as shabby and distasteful. Her life on the streets is pathetic as well as a means of escaping her dreary, cluttered and oppressive family existence. Like the Surrealists, Chabrol seems to appreciate the liberationist role of romantic desire in Violette's life. But if he approves of Violette's flouting of the norms of bourgeois respectability, he also knows the frightening downside. Her entanglement with Dabin is seen with no less complexity. If the young woman desperately in love provokes our sympathy, she also seems an utter fool for submitting with such passivity to her lover's extortionist demands.

The film's discontinuous method accentuates all these dualities. Certain key events are seen in flashbacks that suddenly interrupt the present action. Sometimes hazy and thus shrouded in indeterminacy, they may represent Violette's romanticization and/or distortion of the past. But perhaps-- it's hard to tell-- they represent actual events in the young woman's life, like a scene which reveals (without definitive justification) Violette's painful feeling in childhood that she has been neglected by her mother.

As for the crime itself, here Chabrol also deals in ambiguity. Though the depiction of the murder is blunt and unsparing, as are Violette's mercenary motives for it, there are still uncertainties surrounding the event. We know that Violette is a habitual liar, and so must doubt her claim that she'd been regularly molested by her father. Yet certain flashbacks possibly provide supporting evidence. In one, the teenage Violette, boldly naked, stands at a sink and washes herself while her father is nearby, trying to talk to her. He is either engaged in lasciviously eyeing his daughter's body or-- again, it's difficult to tell-- he is carefully looking the other way. At an earlier time, Violette's father is seen vigorously bouncing the young teenager on his lap. Both appear to like the fun, but Violette's mother furiously pulls her daughter away. A mother's jealousy or a father's incestuous lust? As elsewhere, Isabelle Huppert's cool impassivity encompasses all these possibilities.

Copenhagen Pleasures: Part Two

Before leaving for Denmark, I'd taken the precaution of ordering tickets online for two tempting events-- a new staging of Giselle at the Royal Danish Ballet and a new production of Handel's Partenope at the Royal Danish Opera. Both were scheduled at the "Gamle Scene"-- the handsome old opera house in the square named Kongens Nytorv. And both, for reasons I'll explain below, were especially newsworthy. I suspected-- quite rightly-- that tickets might be difficult to get on the spot.

On October 25th, shortly after our arrival in Copenhagen, we attended Giselle. It was a lovely introduction to the Danish cultural scene, but also exciting because this production was Nicolaj Hubbe's first project in his interesting new job as director of the RDB. Though I hadn't seen Hubbe dance very recently, I knew him-- and his reputation-- as a splendid principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. I expected his history with the NYCB to shape what he'd do as director in Copenhagen-- especially in this important initial production. I guess I was looking forward to an edgy, Balanchine-inspired evening, rather than the conventional romantic version of Giselle that he did mount. Conventional, but beautiful! And beautifully danced by the long-legged, elegant Silja Schandorff and Nehemiah Kish, her Canadian Albrecht. I've since read that Hubbe dedicated this production to Henning Kronstan (an earlier dancer, ballet-master and director at the RDB) in whose staging he himself apparently danced his first Albrecht. I also heard that the second cast (we saw the first), with Mads Blangstrup and Gudrun Bojesen, had a very different feel. When I asked an usher about it, she gushed "Oh Mads-- he's so gorgeous!" Kish may not have been as dramatically compelling as his Danish colleague, but he was no slouch in the role. At any rate, the audience was ecstatic. Since this was the last night for Giselle, the applause went on and on. No one wanted to let the dancers go home.

Our opera experience a few days later was even more thrilling. But first I must write about our pre-opera cab ride with an articulate and intelligent driver (not at all unusual in Copenhagen!). When he learned that we were going to the venerable "Old Stage," and that we were a bit early, he offered to turn off his meter and take us for a short tour of the city. He particularly wanted us to see the Operaen-- Copenhagen's modern new opera house, which had opened in 2005. Parking at the edge of the Inderhavnen Canal, he pointed across the harbor to the striking, Henning Larsen-designed building, blazing with lights, on Holmen Island. As we looked across the water and nodded admiringly, the cabbie told us about Maersk McKinney Moeller, the Danish tycoon who had commissioned and paid for the entire cost of the expensive new structure. Moeller, whose family owns a vast container ship company, was for years considered to be Denmark's wealthiest citizen. (Lately, he's been replaced in that stratospheric niche by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the head of Lego.) We had a lively discussion about the pros and cons of such beneficence. Only a day later, we would hear again about this prominent billionaire. Invited to pay a visit to new friends in Charlottenlund, up the coast from Copenhagen, we were given explicit instructions for approaching their house. It was accessible only from one end of their street, since the street was awkwardly divided in half midway by a barrier built to protect a wealthy neighbor-- this same Moeller.

But back to the opera. Again, we were present at the final night of a sold-out production. The lobby of the Gamle Scene was packed, the audience buzzing with anticipation as we all waited impatiently for the doors to open. This was not my first Partenope. In fact, I'd seen a glorious production of it by the same director-- Francisco Negrin-- at Glimmerglass in 1998. I rather doubted that many in the Copenhagen audience had caught that one. But they probably had seen, or certainly knew about, the RDO's 2005 Giulio Cesare, also directed by Negrin and with much of the same cast. It received rave reviews in Copenhagen as well as enthusiastic attention elsewhere when it came out on DVD.

Which explains why there was proleptic excitement for this new Partenope. Like Negrin's Giulio Cesare, it was a modern dress version-- witty and lively, full of humorous quirks and comic absurdities, but its modernity unblemished by "Eurotrash." Handel's music and its glorious lyricism, it goes without saying, is magnificent. I still remembered the terrific performances of it at Glimmerglass by counter-tenors David Daniels and David Walker. The RDO, on this last night, was equally memorable. Andreas Scholl, as Arsace, started out slightly wan, but quickly picked up strength and ended the evening singing powerfully and beautifully. Christophe Dumaux, a counter-tenor new to me, was a sweet-voiced, tender Armindo. I especially liked Tuva Semmingsen's peformance in the pants role of Rosmira. Only Inger Dam-Jensen, in the title role, seemed slightly outclassed. The orchestra-- the original instrument band Concerto Copenhagen led by Lars Ulrik Mortensen-- was outstanding and vigorously cheered by the audience. But so was the entire cast. Bravos, bravissimos, whistles and rhythmic clapping went on forever! In sum-- a wonderful Copenhagen evening.