Hail, Daniel (and Nico): thanks for reading! I may have only one more post on these topics left in me: but I’m grateful for the seriousness and vividness of your rejoinders to my thoughts (on Ainadamar and Klinghoffer in particular, and l’école de Sellars in general) and so am happy to respond as follows:
1.) Ainadamar: Daniel, might you be misreading Bernstein, Revueltas, and Ginastera in claiming that “Golijov is not interested in doing how they do, refracting the light of the vernacular through the distorting prism of 12-TET and classical performance practice, but rather in suspending the cultural hierarchies that suggest that such an experience of vernacular music might be preferable to an unmediated one”? Ainadamar is a ninety-minute opera composed for acoustically organized voices and chamber orchestra, performed in venues like Carnegie Hall and Tanglewood. What, in either text (by which I mean both words and music) or approach, questions such hierarchies? You seem to suggest that Bernstein, Revueltas, and Ginastera (who, if they had composed Ainadamar, would have seen it performed in the same places, by the same forces) mediated their Latino sources through other techniques in order to clean them up, to tame them: fearing perhaps that the raw simple stuff might be too pungent, too little prestigious, for the uptown crowd. But there’s another, simpler reason to combine familiar material with more unusual stuff: to make it feel fresh. Both Latin musics and Hispanophone composers have been welcome in the concert hall for at least a century. The statue aria and several of the choruses in Ainadamar hint that Golijov is absolutely capable of rethinking these musics; so I don’t think that framing his overreliance on the familiar as a brave sally against the taste police serves either him or his audience. The main cultural criterion that much of Ainadamar challenges is the one that devalues cliché.
In light of Ainadamar, I wonder about your placement of Porgy and Bess. I yield to no one in my admiration for this score: but, honestly, to describe the whole piece as a blues opera based just on “It Ain’t Necessarily So” seems as reductive as when Joan Peyser, in the August 2001 Opera News, argues that Porgy and Bess’s greatness lies in (and only in) the atonal orchestral interludes it inherits from Berg. Porgy and Bess is a masterpiece of maximalism: rendering its subjects (African-American experience, African-American sound) at once utterly themselves and salt-spray fresh by applying to them the entire polychrome range of Gershwin’s sources. Contrast the “Spain is a river of mourning” section in Ainadamar with “My Man’s Gone Now” from the Gershwin. Logically, the latter shouldn’t work at all. That driving triple meter, that exotic, ascending diminished fourth in Clara’s obbligato, the matchlessly sophisticated quasi-Ravelian harmonic sequence in the bridge “Not that I mind workin’”; how can these express the mourning of an unlettered fishwife in the American South? Brilliantly, as it turns out: because Gershwin isolated what was essential, both emotionally and ethnically, about the moment (the keening vocal utterance, the minor-key milieu) and ignited it with quartal harmonies that sound more like d-minor than d-minor does. Did Gershwin (did Bernstein, Ginastera, Revueltas) do this in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the D.M.A. degree? No: he did it to make the scene hotter, fresher, bolder: also to give his very luxurious forces (the orchestra, the trained voices) the materials they need in order to interpret, not merely quote, raw feeling. I would also suggest that lavishing these musics on characters and stories hitherto marginalized in opera made a broader cultural point as well: that Gershwin (and team) saw Clara not merely a heroine of American or African-American opera, but of Opera, period. This is the challenge to which I would like to see Golijov’s next opera rise.
2.) L’école de Sellars: Now I feel a bit misread here. You write, “Adamo advocates a reformed opera, a unified drama, in which historical scenes are re-enacted, where time flows ahead steadily instead of leaping forward or backward and then standing still.” I’m all for unified drama: but where, Daniel, have I ever advocated so hidebound an approach to dramatic flow, either in print or in my own work? Little Women, strangely enough, is a very encyclopaedia of the techniques you suggest I resist. It starts in Jo’s present, jumps two years back, and ends where it began: scenes take place in real time, unless they compress six months into as many minutes or leave time entirely in ghostly dialogue. But even if I did advocate linear-and-only-linear storytelling, that would make (at least) two of us: me and Peter Sellars. The only thing extra-narrative about either The Death of Klinghoffer or Doctor Atomic are the choruses; even Klinghoffer’s dying aria takes place in sequence. Whatever Sellars says about his work, when he writes, his dramatic calendar is Menotti’s.
You go on to write:
“(Adamo) wants showing, as the writing-workshops cluck, not telling. Sellars would argue—has argued—that we don’t need opera to do these things. We have television. If you want to show the hijacking of the Achille Lauro as it actually happened, you can make a TV movie; if you want to see history re-enacted, we have the History Channel.”
An interesting argument: but, again, the work under scrutiny suggests otherwise. Neither Sellars nor Goodman forgo the History Channel approach in The Death of Klinghoffer. The most compelling moments of the piece owe to just such documentary details: the Austrian woman carefully rationing out her pears and chocolate in preparation for a long siege, the Captains’ ineffectual Halcions, the British dancer’s nicotine cravings. It’s from this matrix that the team builds some of their most compelling scenes. They’re good monologues, strong monologues: and, apart from their overlength, they’re also speeches that would slip quite readily into a T.V. movie on this topic. Look again at Goodman’s Act Two speech for Klinghoffer, now lineated as prose:
KLINGHOFFER
I know how children in the Promised Land learn to sleep underground because of your shelling. Old men at the Wailing Wall get a knife in the back. You laugh. You pour gasoline over women passengers on the bus to Tel Aviv and burn them alive. You don’t give a shit, excuse me, about your grandfather’s hut…you just want to see people die.”
You suggest that “…(Sellars) looks to pre-reform forms; he looks to opera seria and oratorio and masque.” Agreed. I think it’s telling to observe that all of these forms are defined by flatness and by exclusion. Masque was a genre of obsequious dinner entertainment for aristocrats, the writers of whom—on Brigadoon-rare occasions—tried to satirize the nobles who commissioned them. (I don’t see much masque in either recent piece, although certainly the Act Two ballet in Nixon in China evokes the form.) Contrarily, the opera seria movement sought to cleanse morally complex, richly human, and politically irreducible plots like Busenello’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea from the opera house. Certainly I see the traces of this scouring tendency everywhere in the libretti of Doctor Atomic and The Death of Klinghoffer, in which any real challenges to the viewpoints of the authors are muted to inaudibility. But you lose me when you invoke as credible models of theatrical composition “Bach, Handel, Stravinsky, and Messaien.” Bach was not a theatre writer—those Passions were liturgy, not drama—and Messaien is germane only insofar as his approach to St. François d’Assise is Bach’s: a believer writing for, not about, believers. Stravinsky as an opera composer was acted upon (by Hogarth, Mozart), more than acting: his influence is negligible; and the opera seria of Handel are revived in spite of, not because of, their narratives. Because Handel, apparently unlike Adams, heard no conflict between emotional truth and vocal virtuosity, we revive those pieces to give moments to singing actors, not to lend ear to Handel’s bowdlerized librettists. You suggest that “perhaps these traditions are the only way to do justice to the subjects Sellars has chosen.’ I suggest exactly the opposite. These longing backward glances, these nostalgic lunges towards remembered certainties… these self-consciously two-dimensional traditions of previous eras are wholly inadequate to sing the way we live now.
You go on to wonder, “Can you imagine a Christian writing a post-Verdian style opera on the life of Christ? I mean, I’m sure it’s happened, (Massenet’s Marie-Magdalene!) it’s just not a great idea—clearly there are other, possibly more respectful ways it should be presented.” (David Gockley told me recently that Wagner was mulling a life of Jesus Christ before turning to Parsifal: closer to our own time, well… funny you should ask.) “Post-Verdian” could mean anything in this context, so I won’t press you on it: I’m more curious about your use of the word “respectful” as a dramatic value. The theatre—of which the opera house partakes—exists in part to roast—not gild—sacred cows. Verdi, when setting La Traviata in (then) present-day Paris, didn’t keep a respectful distance from Violetta’s ambiguities—he wrote them, in full—which is why his censors insisted that the opera be backdated. In that argument—between the censors’ taste and Verdi’s passionate dramatic involvement—which position would you have respected? “Nobody walks out of the St Matthew Passion saying, “Y’know, I couldn’t really get into Jesus’s head,’” you write. Just so! Which is why the Saint Matthew Passion belongs in a church. Whereas hot political topics like the hijacking of the Achille Lauro (or, for that matter, re-examinations of religious myth) about which people can substantially, and profitably, disagree, belong in the theatre: where they should be treated as drama, not doctrine.
3.) The Death of Klinghoffer I thought I made my opinions on this opera clear. Perhaps I have not. Again: I do not suggest that The Death of Klinghoffer is anti-Semitic in intent. I do suggest that some of its writing choices are so bewildering that I can see how audiences might get that impression. (Alice Goodman’s memories of collaborating with Sellars on this project are germane here.) Play this game with me a moment: instead of the current text of the Chorus of Exiled Jews, imagine a verbal portrait of hard-nosed Israeli settlers—drunk on gusts of Herzl, the tintinnabulations of Kristallnacht still ringing in their ears—grimly bulldozing those Palestinians’ houses and apologizing for nothing. I’d argue that such a text would be infinitely more telling (and maybe even less inflammatory) than what’s there now, not because it would be necessarily more sympathetic but because it would be clearer. As I have made pains to point out, the self-absorption of the other characters is neither here nor there, because such self-absorption is not echoed, extra-narratively, by, say, the Chorus of Neutral Swiss. Again, had those opening choruses been omitted, even Klinghoffer’s aria might have worked. What these observations underline to me—to return to your last critique—is the inadequacy of the oratorio model in mediating modern stories. We don’t need more willed or nostalgic certainties. We need the courage—and the skill—to confront unsolved conflicts, in their all-too-human ambiguity. Skill isn’t all of modernity: but there’s no modernity without it.
That’s all for now, except for, again, my thanks for the seriousness with which you approach this project. Let more heat generate more light! More to follow, let us affirm; best now….MA
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