starkers scheite schichtet mir dort
Need you ask who discusses the subject of nudity in opera (among other performing arts) in today’s Times?
[W]hen nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.
There was, for example, Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,†at the Public Theater in 2002, about a superstar baseball player who reveals that he is gay. The play could not have explored how the interpersonal dynamics of baseball’s locker-room culture are shaken by the star’s announcement without showing the players in the clubhouse showers.
. . . . Already in previews at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway is Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,†a new production from London of the 1973 play. Naturally, fans of the young Daniel Radcliffe will be enticed by the chance to see him, our adorable Harry Potter, in the buff.
La Cieca kids, of course, because Tony Tommasini would never stoop to conscious lasciviousness. In fact, in the current screed, our scribe remains relentlessly high-minded in his rehashing of 1960s cliches about how “when nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.”
Your doyenne should add here that, though she’s no Biblical scholar, she is shocked that Mr. Tommasini should be laboring under the misapprehension that the Gospels of Mark and Matthew are part of the Old Testament.
It would be absolutely natural and called for to see Mr. Gunn or Mr. Keenlyside nude onstage.
As for Mr. Tommasini, he must remain clothed even when he is taking showers at home alone .
Random question – on CAMI’s website there’s an Angela Maria Blasi working with Matthew Epstein. Is that the soprano Angela Maria Blasi, or just a bizarre coincidence?
Josephine, you are a hoot, and right on the mark….Have mental pic of Tomassini in the shower in his winter coat lol
Kundry’s T: It’s the same Angela Maria Blasi.
So what happened with Ms Blasi’s singing?
She’s definitely still singing. For instance, she joins the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in February, for Marx songs with orchestra.
Was I the only one expecting nude pictures of Mark adn Matthew when clicking on the hyperlinks?
Curious – maybe Ms Blasi wants to see how the other half live (or what her rivals are doing)…
Blasi, what an un(der)sung heroine: her Musetta on the Conlon soundtrack for the Boheme film steals the show (and she looked pretty good, too). Likewise her role in some Mahler 8 or other, I forget which now.
As for Mr. Tommasini, he must remain clothed even when he is taking showers at home alone
That would be a shame, I think he’s quite sexy. I wouldn’t mind him doing a nude scene for me.
Maria Ewing did the full on naked thing when she sang Salome here in Los Angeles. It was definitely a case of “Well, I can’t sing the role, so I’m going to distract you with my bush”. In San Francisco, I’ve never seen so many binoculars snap to attention as when whoever the opera had dancing Tadzio appeared at the lip of the stage to begin the Games of Apollo in Britten’s opera.
Nothing new. We had David Freeman’s Opera Factory folk flapping their tired old bits about for years.
Mind you, I have a friend who remembers nothing but the privates on parade in any show he goes to see. ‘Bent’, for him, was always about the well-hung young man who crossed the stage within the first few minutes.
I only ever found nudity on stage sensual once – in the Maly Theatre production of Chekhov’s Platonov, where there was a late-night nude-bathing scene in the ‘river’ which dominated the stage. What works on film rarely does in the cold light of theatre.
See also Mark 14:51-2:
51 And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: 52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
The young man in question is traditionally identified with Mark, the author of the gospel. (I’m not sure whether the “young men” are the apostles or the arresting mob.)
Regards,
Helen
There was a nude scene in The Handmaid’s Tale, and it was both rather shocking and strangely beautiful. Offred was astride Nick, humping him, without her top on while singing a complicated aria. I just thought to myself the whole time, man! that chick is naked AND singing!
I think Blasi recorded the Mahler 8 in Munich with Colin Davis, for BMG, which is on SACD. I know she recorded the Brahms requiem with him–and possibly Mozart as well.
I could do a nude scene *tomnorrow*- it’s a question of lighting and scrims…
re n. 11:
used to be you couldnt even audition for Opera Factory unless you were prepared to agree to and accept the compulsory nudity clause in the contract. It was done and “shown” as a matter of course. On occasion David Freeman would even ask you to undress AT the actual audition… From personal experience… AANND… that well over 20 yrs ago! LOL…
I dont really know WHAT *tom-norrow* might be, but if it is “a question of lighting and scrims…” then it could be ANYTHING!
As for nude scenes I did my very first in L. Berio’s “Un Re in Ascolto” at the ROH circa 1989!!
Oyvehy…
Maybe TT was confusing Mark and Matt with Moses and (A)Aron, and he thought how natural and called for copious nudity would be in the Golden Calf scene.
Or he thought of Samson. Samson / Salome – close enough.
Scaramuccio and Tubsinger: The Mahler 8th with Blasi is actually the Sinopoli on DG. (Paired with Studer, with Jo as Mater Gloriosa.) The RCA Colin Davis has Marc, Sweet, and Norberg-Schulz as its 3 sopranos.
Just to close out that little sidebar….
I’m still trying to think of a Brunnhilde I’d care to see naked…maybe Dame Gwyneth back in the Boulez Ring? Of the Brunnhildes I’ve seen…Schnaut, Zschau, Behrens and Eaglen (and…I think I’m missing one, hmmm), I think I’d prefer just to take Siegfried’s word for it.
Opera, historically, thematically, and substantively, is based on the Greek theater. The Florentine fathers of opera added music to enhance the dramatic or comedic value of a play. Chorus, an integral part of Greek plays, was used and became also part of opera; and the first and many other operas were based on Greek figures or Greek theatrical subjects.
There was no nudity in Greek theater and at times even faces were masked to add mystery and mysticism in the action. Greeks were not prude. Afrer all, they competed in the buff at the Olympic Games. Like in the Greek theater, partial of total nudity has no place and adds no value in opera, unless is used to titillate. If nudity is used to market opera, we might as well have the real thing: Don Giovanni, nude on stage, having real sex! Hardcore porn opera will solve all the financial challenges of opera houses!
There were no women in Greek theatre either. Does that mean they have no place in opera?
Personally I find it risible in a production of ‘Don Giovanni’ if both the Don and Anna are presumed somehow to have got themselves fully dressed in the middle of a fight following an attempted rape.
‘I will pursue you like a desperate fury… Hang on a minute while I get this corset on’
wait … im confused: nudity has no place in opera but it’s okay in sports???
come to think of it, *that* might get me to watch the super bowl.
By the way, Wieland Wagner had an idea, unfortunately unrealized, to stage Tristan und Isolde with both of them naked in the second act.
Have to disagree Constantine… though I’m struggling to recall an opera production I’ve ever seen with frontal nudity I have seen plenty of ’straight’ theatre with it where it has been pretty essential (I’m thinking of an immensely disturbing hour I spent with the play ‘Stallerhof’ where the teenage daughter is raped and then is about to have a home abortion when her mother shows the first shred of humanity in the whole play and tells her to get dressed again). ‘Straight’ theatre (for lack of a better term) also comes from the Greeks, no?
I’m all for nudity.
suor angelica, nude on stage, having sex with herself…
re: Sour Angelica
Pace Pace Mio Dio…which loosely translates as “Redact Redact My God.”
Armerjacquino: Personally I find it risible in a production of ‘Don Giovanni’ if both the Don and Anna are presumed somehow to have got themselves fully dressed …
Well, part of this is a convention of a theater where nudity was inconceivable. But more to the point, Donna Anna’s account of the pre-curtain encounter specifies that Don Giovanni advanced no farther in his nefarious purpose than embracing her tightly and, for a moment, preventing her crying out. Once she regained her freedom, she screamed and Don Giovanni fled. So there is no necessary reason that much, if any, undressing took place.
Even had the sexual encounter been consummated, the principals might well have remained mostly dressed; in fact would probably not have stripped down because of the time constraint. Perhaps one or two of the readers of parterre.com may recall incidents from their own lives when they performed a furtive sexual act while more or less fully clothed. (Not with each other, La Cieca means, but, well, you get the idea.)
La Cieca—
That was the most RIDICULOUS remark. Come on!
”
That was the most RIDICULOUS remark. Come on!”
Um, really? Because it makes perfect sense to me, especially in that period of dress. You’re telling me that Anna would have taken off dress, corset, underskirts, and various other accoutrements in the course of a rape? She would do everything she could to keep her clothes ON.
Not ridiculous in the slightest, and is only made ridiculous by the laziness of the regie.
I find nothing ridiculous in the apt remark about the prescriptes of a different time, or the furtive sex remark- nothing silly other than Joesy pathetic attempt to irritate our doyenne.
Set your alarm cock, er, clock, drearie, you’ll have ot be up much earlier, and then no one will care. This is Cieca’s realm.
Got it.?
Peter Ackroyd claims in his slatest book on Shakespeare (though I don’t know what he bases it on) that in Elizabethan times people kept quite a bit of clothing on becasue the sight of scars, wobbly bits, dirty bits, and diseased bits would have put participants off.
I may have to lie down…
The first total nudity I ever saw on the opera stage – not sure of the year – 1972? – was Carol Neblett’s Poppaea at the New York City Opera. Long before Bumbry became the first nude Salome.
Take Me Out was a lousy play pretending to be about a subject it never even approached; without the nude scene they’d never have sold the tickets, and yet the only scenes that were written at all well were the monologues of Denis O’Hare as a fag accountant who has just discovered baseball. Clearly these were the only moments that resonated with the playwright’s own experience.
If an opera singer has to take her/his clothes off to express sex, s/he can’t be much of a singer. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gunn?
“….Donna Anna’s account of the pre-curtain encounter specifies that Don Giovanni advanced no farther in his nefarious purpose than embracing her tightly….”
True, but there is also the question over how much of the truth she is actually revealing to Don Ottavio during this conversation – a spring-off point for many interesting directorial concepts regarding the psychology of Donna Anna…
There’s also the ambiguity of ‘ma riconobbi poi che un’inganno era il mio’ which, in my interpretation at least, suggests a little more than a handshake.
All that stuff about did-she-didn’t-she in the darkened room is post-Mozartian self-indulgence. The whole thing is most powerful if Anna is youthful, and a victim of attempted rape. Deborah Warner put that point across very powerfully at Glyndebourne. It’s a male-chauvinist point of view, surely, to say ’she was gagging for it, actually’.
I remember a production of Salome a year or two ago: where instead of doing her dance, Salome follicked with Herod and played with illuminated red globe balls. The twit of a director had then employed a group of male and female ‘naked extras’ to run around in flapping open overcoats or strip off; and some to tightly embrace and ’shag’ in various clenches.
All this activity was a display of Strauss’ Dance of the ‘wiggling willies’. I suspect to distact from the lousy singers, and rat shit atrocious mod production. It was little better than a cheap sleazy XXX peep show basement cinema show. And we were warned ‘the production would be ’shocking’???!!
Perhaps to someone’s 90 year old grandmother who
saw a production of Salome back in 1958 with Joan Hammond.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD…ARE YOU READING ABOUT ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE SINGERS?
Good Joan H., not the most athletic performers on stage by that period, danced her seven veils dance fully clothed and excited the senses of the ‘good taste’ audience…. by discarding progressively each of seven little different coloured hankies, tucked in the belt of her dress!(This, was told to me by one of her fellow performers in the production)
Another time back in the 80’s, there was a production of Samson & Deliah. Naked creatures crawling up and down a well lit huge cobweb of ropes upstage. Unfortunely one male got too close to the leg of a fellow female artist. His ‘member’ got ‘highly warmed up’ as a result, so to speak. The female got a little terrified / embarrassed / or startled …. tried to quickly retreat away from his apppendage. The audience noticed this disturbing distraction,and turned their full attention to the new temperory ‘rising star’ of the opera. To hell with the music, or the operatic stars singing the actual opera!
Then there was a recent case of a 60 or so, year old ‘duck’ soprano who will remain nameless. Who went nude for a bath scene in a Handel opera…it is like paying to purve through the Porkie’s keyhole to the locker-rooms; at some elderly womens’ afternoon swimming event!!!!
Scara- I don’t think anyone in this conversation has said that, have they?
Kundry’s Therapist raised it, I thought. Anyway, I wasn’t accusing anyone, just pre-empting, Isn’t it the most common directorial idea these days that Anna DID recognise Don G and let him get on with it for a bit? Mozart and Da Ponte give no hint of going along with that.
Anyway, I think the piece is much stronger if there is genuine outrage on the side of the ‘angels’: Anna and Elvira are not sops (and I don’t mean sopranos), and even Ottavio needn’t come across as utterly wet if he’s seen as young, naive and inexperienced.
I think the problem with Ottavio is ‘Dalla Sua Pace’, really. Utterly beautiful but dramatically static and such an odd, odd reaction to the crisis of ‘Or Sai’.
That’s singer power for you, I suppose.
…right, and anyway, Cassandra, she wouldn’t have needed to “have taken off dress, corset, underskirts, and various other accoutrements” coz she probably wouldnt have been wearing them.
She was alone in her room and it was the middle of the night, (”…era già alquanto avanzata la notte…” and presumably in bed already. That’s why in most productions she usually comes out in her nighty or in a robe over it.
In actual fact though, I would tend to second you general point, especially because of all of the above. I mean just trying to hold her tight, then one hand up the night-gown, between her legs, the other, as she says herself, over her mouth to stifle her cries (attempted cries, allegedely!)… really no time to get naked or even no NEED!
(is it weird that I am being aroused by my own account of this scene?? LOL )
Yes, LVPO, very.
By the way, Behrens’ naked Brunnhilde wouldn’t have been too grisly a sight. She was no spring chicken when she sang Salome, but she certainly revealed all then. I remember getting her to sign the cover of my Karajan box booklet, between the breasts and bush of the naked lady in the art-image. She was delightful about it all – wearing a leopard-skin coat (not carrying a box of eggs), I seem to remember.
I like Kiri with naked shoulders, that is as far as necessary
Hans Lick screeched:
The first total nudity I ever saw on the opera stage – not sure of the year – 1972? – was Carol Neblett’s Poppaea at the New York City Opera. Long before Bumbry became the first nude Salome.
As dear Anna used to say:
“I. Was. Not. Nude.”
It may have looked like I stripped down to my “perfume and jewels” but we artists have WAYS.
Besides, Herr Lick, my first Salome was in *1970* at the Garden.
Hey SCARA:…
a case of signing the box on the.. BOX!! LOL!
Now I really AM aroused!… Behrens, and Solti and Box… Oh MY!
armerjacquino :
“..the problem with Ottavio is ‘Dalla
Sua Pace’…. an odd, odd reaction to the crisis of
‘Or Sai’.
But it’s an odd relationship, very co-dependent,
in modern parlance ( something of no interest at
all to 18th century audiences I’m sure) BUT,
and I’m sure this will raise a few hackles…
I thought the Peter Sellars ‘Spanish Harlem’
DON G. really worked, with the Afro-American Perry
brothers, twins, as the Don and Leporello, Lorraine
Hunt’s Elvira, struggling a bit with the tessitura
but an intense early memento of a great artist, and
the most convincing Anna/Ottavio relationship I’ve seen…certainly not the only DON G. I would want
to own, and none of the singers would compare favorably with the best, but an example, for me, of
‘regie’ stimulating and enhancing a great work.
I still come over all funny when I recall Lady Hall, as she was then, Maria Ewing come to the front of the stage and waggle all of her bits at us like a deranged Tessie Tura at the close of the Dance of the Seven (or was it 3 and a half) veils, back lit by a blood-red moon – I haven’t been able to touch a hard boiled egg since……..
Blimey, Graciella, I think there’s VHS of that Sellars DG, taken from the telly, at my parents’ place somewhere. I had no idea that Hunt was the Elvira, I’ll root it out and have a look.
And, meremarie, some of the more tradition-bound of my compatriots used to BOIL at the ‘Lady Hall’ thing. Her ‘title’, as the wife of a knight, would have been ‘Maria, Lady Hall’ which is altogether different. The kind of thing that bothers people who are bothered by that kind of thing.
Well, you know armerjacquino, life behind a wimple shelters one from the vanities of worldly jostlings- but thank you for the orientation – it will be useful for when I need aristocratic patronage to replace wire for the convent chicken coop, or freebie opera tickets to see the next nudie show
Haha, meremarie.
I’d watch out for that Soeur Blanche, by the way.
She strikes me as something of a loose cannon. I don’t think you’d be able to rely on her in your hour of need.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,799471,00.html?promoid=googlep
This is an amusing account of NYCO’s great Brenda Lewis; she was in her late twenties when she did Salome and she definitely went there. The tour mentioned in the article took place in 1949, I believe. In any event, Brenda was a pioneer in many ways, and 60 years ago she was showing ‘em how it was done. Really showing ‘em, God bless her!
Ian,
“Straight” theater came from the Greeks too, but still threre was no nudity.
armerjacquino, Blanche got the chop – I”M still here.
What was it Frederick Ashton said about the pitfalls of nude ballet? – things moving after the music stopping…….having to sing and the physical effort involved is even less welcome to watch….. Those poor opera diva/o’s have enough to contend with without having to bare their all.
Constantine- I say again- so what? Your ‘if it wasn’t in Greek theatre, it has no place in modern theatre’ argument is one of the most logically spurious I’ve ever heard. Unless you want all-male, masked productions of absolutely everything.
I long for “want all-male, masked productions of absolutely everything.”!!!
LVPO
even the road company of ‘Cacoon’?