Fishy realness
Rusalka, in the marvelous production by Stefan Herheim, is now streaming live from La Monnaie. La Cieca is sure the cher public will not be shy about sharing their opinions about this staging!
Rusalka, in the marvelous production by Stefan Herheim, is now streaming live from La Monnaie. La Cieca is sure the cher public will not be shy about sharing their opinions about this staging!
I would probably approve of almost anything to drag customers into a musical performance as good as this Rusalka. Although most of the singing sounds phonetically acquired (not exactly ?eská styl), I just relistened to it again and still found it to be as good as I thought the first time through.
- If Herheim’s name actually sells tickets and keeps the band playing on, I certainly am not going to complain. At least here in this Bruxelles Rusalka revival he had an excellent conductor & cast, which is more than can be said for some of his other productions.
- When I watched this Rusalka video, there was so much fastmoving distracting stage business (much of which required my complete attention to the detail) I didn’t have time to concentrate on the music. This would be an asset if I had to sit through that absymally played Herheim Gatti Bayreuth Parsifal -> it would be a relief to concentrate on the staging & not bother to listen to what came out of the pit, but this performance of Rusalka is meaningful to listen to, not just to watch. And what really is Herheim’s point here in Rusalka? Another exercise in the personal-social consciousness realism of human life? I find his over-staged gimmickry an annoyance rather than entertainment.
- Zach of the Times in the last paragraph of his review (via his retelling of his conversation with the woman sitting next to him at the Rusalka performance) seemed to be surprised when she told him she was a bit ‘confused’ by the distracting overstaging. She was not the only one, and I can’t blame it on old age since many parterrians and others even older than I seem to be enchanted, not confused, by all the intricate stage business of Hernheim’s stage art. After all, they are quite an exercise in mental alertness -- a Herheim staging a day or a week makes crossword puzzles exercise unnecessary. Herheim is fashionable and parterrians tend to (but not always) follow the fashionable mode of the times. Well, nothing succeeds like excess — as we saw during the latter half of the 20th century with Zefferelli’s detailed but monolithic stagings — so let’s have another 30-40 years of Herheim, too, and hopefully he will succeed in generating more interest, filling the seats, getting donations, etc.
I was just reading a book called Brecht at the Opera in which the author discusses her experience at the performance of La forza del destino directed by Herheim. As she explains it, the “confusion” felt by the spectator at a Herheim staging is associated with the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, which she takes pains not to translate as the usual “alienation” but rather as “estrangement.”
The process is that the spectator sees something on the stage that is at first glance incongrous or “wrong,” thus making the experience momentarily “strange.” Then, ideally, the spectator tries to reconcile what is being seen what what is expected, or, to put it a different way, to make sense of what seems to be nonsense. The final step is that the “puzzle” is solved and the spectator gets a quick moment of satisfaction iand pleasure from having accomplished this task. Now the thing that was strange has now become familiar. The fact that the meaning of the stage image is derived by the spectator (rather than having it explained to him) means that the idea is impressed all the more strongly on the mind.
I would take the “estrangement” argument further by saying that it applies especially well the standard operatic repertory. When works or art are overly familiar we tend to become complacent about them and, frankly, lazy about engaging with them. By “estranging” Rusalka, Herheim offers the opportunity to see (and, more to the point) to hear the work from a different, fresh perspective. (Brecht calls this the “consciously critical” attitude as opposed to passive observation.)
It would be interesting if you would expand on the idea of “personal-social consciousness realism of human life,” since I really have no idea what you mean by that.
Thanks so much for your explanation of that Brecht/Herheim theatrical process. I wish I could return the favor by explaining ‘personal-social consciousness realism of human life’ as a theatrical process, but unfortunately that is not possible since my intellectual communication abilities are limited. I am sure it will be no effort for you, you with your academic and personal brilliance, to review the meaning of each word in that phrase and ‘reconcile what is being seen what what is expected, or, to put it a different way, to make sense of what seems to be nonsense.’ Hodn? št?stí!
Being a jerk is a good way of being put on moderation around here.
I haven’t read the book in question, and I may be coming at things by way of a different theorist (Shklovsky rather than Brecht), but La Cieca’s analysis seems backwards to me. If the point of the V-effect is merely to “get a quick moment of satisfaction” by solving the riddle, then it would seem like a trivial and unimportant undertaking. The idea behind “estrangement”, which is a good translation for Shklovsky’s concept of “ostranenie”, is to make reality strange -- not to normalize the strange. We never really “see” that which is normal -- habituation is the enemy of knowledge. So the point of the exercise would be to take an object and make it strange -- and keep it that way. The reader (or audience) should not be left with an answer (that would be banal), but with a question. Is this new thing really like the old thing? How are they the same and yet at the same time different? The “strange” object is not one that replaces the old one; rather, the electric charge between the two explodes any comforting idea that any object “is” something. And it is through this process of continually asking questions, of continually making things strange, and continually deferring answers, that the reader/audience is confronted with reality in all its complexity.
Now, it’s possible that Brecht, for various reasons, wishes to be more didactic than Shklovksy, and merely wishes to teach the audience a lesson, to assert a new normativity. But that’s not the only use for “estrangement” and it might not even be the most poetic one.
(typed on an iPad -- which is uncomfortable and has probably autocorrected me into (further) incoherence.)
The phenomenon you describe, which I take to be a rather broader sort of “estrangement” than Brecht’s special case, is I think also in play in Herheim’s work in that not all the puzzles are quickly or easily solved. Some in fact may be insoluble, with the point being the ‘continually deferring answers” you mention.
Of course what I paraphrased was one author’s Brechtian take on Herheim’s work; I don’t claim that this is Herheim’s own theory. The author posits directing styles like Herheim’s as logical consequences of Brecht’s theatrical theories.
What Herheim’s work is not, I really believe, is modish trivia: it repays close study. And what’s more, I find his work really joyous and exuberant. It seems to be full of love for opera and for the audience, not harsh or forbidding or condescending.
Two brief observations from one who was overwhelmed by Herheim’s Rusalka in the best possible way: The opening is absolute magic, and brought to mind the nonpareil moment in Malle’s “Vanya on 42nd Street” when the real people gathering and kibitizing in the cold empty theater transform almost subliminally into the play itself; it takes a moment to realize it has happened, and it is crazy beautiful, one of my favorite moments in film, especially a film of a play. Herheim begins with pure visual magic, scene-setting of the highest order (physically and thematically), and when the music finally begins and we are in the opera it took my breath away. The other thing this Rusalka called to mind for me was some of the magic of Cocteau’s Orphee, the alchemical blending of realism and fantasy, another kind of magic on the order of the princesse’s hands penetrating the mirror for the first time, which we view again and again and never the same. I could watch this over and over. Herheim is a genius, plain and simple, and the payoff is always there. Also something totally audacious and IMO brilliant and successful (beginning of Acts 2 and 3): the reassigning of music to different characters for dramatic purposes. It threw me at first, until I realized what was going on and went with the flow. Hats off to Maestro Herheim and I can’t wait for more.
Brecht had another word for things like opera: “culinary”. He didn’t restrict the word to opera. Still he felt standard operas were ‘cooked up’ to palliate a bored audience, reassuring them, at least in the 19th century, by their final resolutions on a tonic chord; and also the librettist’s typical embrace of (rather than questioning of) a bourgeois morality. (He might argue that while Violetta dies without a priest present, trying, unrepentantly to get to a party, she still dies, and that satisfies the odious older Germont who had killed her spirit in act two, and more subtly the audience, who is titillated by her vice but glad to see her destroyed).
At the Met, with its high prices and often empty headed though expensive productions of questionable works, we are in a gourmet restaurant, with ‘great’ stars as the specials of an evening. Opera, then, is in itself nearly always a ‘culinary’ experience there.
It is part of the greatness of Herheim one might argue, (also of Konwitschny and Bieto) that they work to redeem the operas they direct from these empty calories. They seek, controversially often enough, to contact the direct impact of music on the brain (brain studies have shown a surprising underlying universality in musical gestures across cultures, despite surface differences) finding perhaps what is profound in what with others can seem ridiculous. (One might contrast the grotesque and finally hilarious Lepage Gotterdammerung, with Konwitschny’s daring, hard edged, production — experienced in the theater it was not simply a Teutonic and very long version of a “Grand Opera” as Shaw argued, but something shocking, strange and profound).