Immortal Longings
Skilled, gorgeous, problematic, New York City Opera summoned Samuel Barber’s and Franco Zeffirelli’s Antony and Cleopatra to Carnegie Hall New York Thursday night: George Manahan paced a cast led by a stunning Lauren Flanigan, and the performance surged and glittered and soared. Only that morning The New York Times had announced the appointment of George Steel to lead the company: perhaps relief, combusted by the palpable warmth in the room—we were there to love it, to love them—sparked the performance to fire. Regardless: it was a brilliant night, for the company and the city.
About the piece itself—the Metropolitan Opera’s first commission for its then-new Lincoln Center house—wars of opinion have raged for years. (Peter G. Davis colors in the background here.) At its première in 1966, was Antony and Cleopatra a delicate autumnal romance crushed beneath Franco Zeffirelli’s ton-of-gold-bricks production? Or was it a wanly chromatic chamber-sized bore that Zeffirelli tried to enlarge, to enliven, with all the stage magic MET money could buy? Did its 1975 Juilliard revision, for which Gian-Carlo Menotti nipped and tucked the libretto, help, hurt, or really change a thing?
City Opera’s concert argued for Antony and Cleopatra as diamonds without a necklace: sixteen precious and crystalline scenes unstrung by substantial misreading of the play. The show begins in mid-romance, with the chorus chiding Antony to leave the humid delights of Egypt and its queen and return to discipline, to manhood: in short, to Rome. Antony, agreeing, breaks the news to Cleopatra: pouting, but nobly so, she accedes. They hymn their love. Antony slouches back to Rome, where Octavius Caesar squints at Antony’s loyalties: Antony suffers to marry Caesar’s sister Octavia to calm the emperor’s qualms, a choice which—when she hears of it—stings Cleopatra to despair. But Antony, seduced by memory, relents, returns, and rushes to Cleopatra’s side against Caesar in the ill-starred battle of Actium: defeated, and despairing of Cleopatra—she’d sent (dissembling) word of her suicide—Antony stabs himself to death. Sola, perduta, abbandonata, and sure to be shamed by conquering Rome, Cleopatra walls herself in her tomb, clasps an asp to her breast, and—truly this time—follows Antony in death.
So far, so basic: but such elegant work Barber makes of it! Yes, there are a (very) few touches of the overfamiliar in the orchestration: parallel fifths in martial twelve-eight time glare in the brass of the Roman scenes; skirling oboe and a whisper of bell-tree whisk us to the Mysterious East. But the body of the score—spiraling, undulant, silken with eight-note polychords—is poised, unmannered, and both more songful and better organized even than Vanessa, Barber’s previous MET commission (with libretto by Menotti) from 1958. And the composer’s thematic invention is ravishing. “O take, o take those lips away,” which now closes Act One, ends in scena, but begins as one of the loveliest American duets since “Bess, you is my woman now” (which it resembles both in rhythmic contour and its piquant “blue” lowered seventh); and Cleopatra’s exquisite and soulful final scene emblazons into memory her four-note motto on “My man of men.”
But the librettist, with Barber’s grudging assent, sanded Shakespeare’s characters—particularly his protean heroine—into blandness, and his narrative into mere incident. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra—shrewd, violent, self-dramatizing, hilarious—craves Antony, but power, too. She’s all queen and all woman, in that order. Antony’s obsession with Cleopatra is likely midlife madness, not so much in loving this bewitching woman as in surrendering to her judgment. If you’re not interested in how personal desire and political responsibility complicate the lives of rulers in love, you’re not interested in Antony and Cleopatra: in this uroboros of a play, sex is politics is sex is politics. But Barber and Zeffirelli bet that one could sing this tragedy by crowding the politics to one side and posing the romance dead center.
So Zeffirelli’s design erases entirely Antony’s first wife Fulvia, who, abandoned back in Rome, wars on Caesar to force Antony home. Taunting Antony for his wife’s power over him comprises all of Cleopatra’s first entrance in Shakespeare: and Fulvia herself powerfully introduces the motif of a woman in Antony’s life wielding politics for personal gains. She is omitted. Cleopatra’s garrulity, her gleeful, theatrical manipulativeness, is comically delicious in the play:
“See where he is, who’s with him, what he does.
I did not send you. If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing: if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick. Quick: return.”
I.iii, 2-5
…but don’t look for it in the opera: there, she’s a Woman in Love. Antony’s marriage to Octavia is weightless to both book and score; the scene afterwards, in which the principals reunite, plays exactly like their first one. Nothing’s happened. We’re told of Anthony’s defeat at Actium, but not of Cleopatra’s rôle in it, which was her insistence, against all logic, on flinging forth her navy when Antony’s army might have triumphed: and scenes 11-13 of Shakespeare’s Act Three, in which Antony spies Cleopatra coolly planning to betray him and flays her in verses of spine-tingling scorn—scenes that comprise the heart of the play—are reduced to a petulant tantrum by Anthony: far too little to motivate Cleopatra’s ruse of suicide.
It’s tempting to blame Zeffirelli for most of this. He was never a writer: as a director, he was mostly a designer; and a collaborative artist who admits (in his 1986 autobiography) that his “grandiose settings would be totally at odds with the music” at a world première and then builds them anyway is neither collaborator, nor artist, at all. But one notes that Barber and Zeffirelli hammered out an outline for the opera together over three weeks in Tuscany in 1964; if, during the blueprint phase, the dramatic deficits revealed themselves, wasn’t it Barber’s responsibility, if not to address them himself—he wasn’t a playwright—then to see, somehow, that they were addressed? Even so, I’m not sure Antony and Cleopatra would perfectly have suited Barber under even better circumstances, and not, as has been asserted ad nauseam, because Barber couldn’t write pageantry. He could: it’s not that hard. But Antony and Cleopatra needs psychology, not clashing shields: and the play’s drastic moods, its comedy (Barber: comedy?) its hypertheatrical Mediterranean heroine—none of these befit the temperament of the poet of West Chester. Thus his score is more beautiful than it is complete. “She is all impassioned lyricism,” Barber wrote of Leontyne Price, his first Cleopatra, during MET rehearsals. True, we know, of the singer: but what of the character? If Zeffirelli treated these characters as models for an Aida-themed fashion-show, Barber, too, was guilty of reducing character to glamour.
And yet: what glamour. Moment to moment, the score is all luxury. You listen to a thoroughly pointless soothsayer-and-handmaiden scene, and grouse, this is a thoroughly pointless soothsayer-and-handmaiden scene: but those seductive half-steps in the vocal lines, that rippling celesta, those cascading harmonies that ride that delicate edge between chord and cluster…You listen to the expanded Beaumont and Fletcher text that makes up “O take, o take those lips away,” and inwardly you rail, “How can Antony sing about her “hills (breasts) of snow” when in Act One, Cleopatra describes herself as “who am by Phoebus’ amourous pinches black?” And that choral motive on Cleopatra’s name—thirds, sighing down first a half-step, than a minor third, enrobed in F-sharp major over G major with God-knows-what passing through in the middle register—no, you think. It gambles with kitsch. But it wins. It’s every bit as sensuous as it means to be. So part of you surrenders. After all, it’s not your problem; you don’t have to act it.
But the singers did. Lauren Flanigan is, on one level, inevitable casting for this piece: her voice has the requisite size and sheen, she’s been City Opera’s prima donna on and off for a decade, and at her best, she can ignite the English language the way Renata Scotto could ignite Italian. But the rôle as written is all yearning, musing, romance; and Flanigan is best when her parts call for wit, sense, frustration, force. She was in great voice. While her basic timbre is cooler and brighter than you usually hear in this music, her line was smooth, her registers smoothly mixed, her pitch sweet and true. But she only really caught dramatic fire in the last act, when at last the needs of the play and the taste of the composer fused. Then she was electrifying. Antony’s rôle, its leanly scored suicide scene notwithstanding, doesn’t reach as convincing a conclusion: Teddy Tahu Rhodes voiced his music beautifully, but couldn’t solve the part. The smaller rôles, being more tangential, were more successful: they didn’t have to carry as much. Simon O’Neill etched Caesar’s brief utterances into a study in silver and steel; David Pittsinger made elegant work of Enobarbus’ narratives, and Sandra Piques Eddy and Laura Vlasek Nolan ringed Cleopatra with arabesques of contralto timbre. And George Manahan—while, as ever, brisker than he is elastic—made oceanic waves of the orchestral score.
But the moment was bigger than the performance; bigger, even, than the piece. Hearing City Opera play Antony and Cleopatra in 2009 reminds you of the passion, and the fragility, of this project we call American opera. For all of us, the stakes are always high. The “failure” of Antony and Cleopatra virtually stopped Barber’s composing. City Opera is still struggling: so too, now, the MET, we learn. But still, Thursday night, hundreds of people devoted their best energies to try again, in this unlikely form, to sing the way we live now. The applause was deafening. Too loud couldn’t have been loud enough.
Next week: Robert Ashley’s Dust, at La MaMa.