Crack of doom
It took about 30 minutes for me to grow restless watching the world premiere video
The payoff came in the last half-hour. As Ligeti mixes original music with distorted quotations of other composers in a rich polyphonic stew, death in the form of the character Nekrotzar announces the impending apocalypse only to be revealed as a fraud when nothing changes. To a haunting passacaglia, the denizens of Breughelland conclude it’s better to make the most of their time on earth than to always live in fear.
With its mix of dark satire and seedy, oddball characters reminiscent of Mahagonny and The Rake’s Progress, Le Grand Macabre is the kind of piece that shakes up preconceived notions and puts space between the audience and the stage by underscoring the artificiality of the performance. But grasping Ligeti’s underlying theme—basically, “How should we live our lives?’’—requires burrowing through a lot of abstract music and finding dramatic continuity in a work that revels in slapstick and its own cynicism.
Ligeti conceived the opera between 1975 and 1977 as a kind of hybrid cabaret-singspiel, drawing on a 1934 play by the avant-garde Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode. The world premiere in Stockholm was rocky, in part because of Ligeti’s insistence that it be performed in the native language of the audience. This created what he later called “empty spaces” for non-Swedish listeners.
Convinced an overhaul was necessary, Ligeti revised the score over 10 months in the mid-1990s, thinning out the orchestration, striking some spoken passages and putting others to music. This version, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, is now accepted as the standard performing edition.
The Arthaus Musik DVD features a staging by the Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus that’s sung in English and co-produced with English National Opera, Opera di Roma and Brussels’ La Monnaie. Over an overture featuring a dozen honking car horns, a short video captures a terrified woman in a dilapidated apartment, surrounded by half-eaten junk food and newspapers with scary headlines.
This turns out to be the model for “Claudia,” the figure that serves as a unit set and turns and twists throughout the performance, serving as a screen for projections and a stage door for the vocalists (I was more than once reminded of B. Kliban’s classic cartoon “The Birth of Advertising”).
In the final act, the figure splits open at the hindquarters to reveal a night club with flanking bars and swinging dancers dressed to resemble body parts. Though such flamboyant slapstick makes the work more accessible and keeps the audience on its toes, it raises questions about whether the hedonists cavorting in around the giant prone figure would really ever bother worrying about apocalyptic predictions.
Le Grand Macabre is fiendishly difficult sing, both because of the punishing tessitura and the way Ligeti and librettist Michael Meschke force the vocalists to sound vulgar while maintaining technical finesse. The Barcelona cast is mostly up to the task, with especially strong contributions from Frode Olsen as the astrologer Astradamors and Chris Merritt as the Sancho Panza-like Piet the Pot, Breughelland’s resident (and very proficient) wine-taster.
The energetic Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan almost steals the show vocally and physically in the dual roles of Venus and Gepopo, the chief of the secret police. Countertenor Brian Asawa is suitably gluttonous and infantile as Prince Go-Go, a ruler brutalized by two corrupt ministers named Black and White. As Nekrotzar, Werner Van Mechelen is stentorian if not especially chilling, amusingly screwing up his chance to “finish the deal” on the apocalypse by losing focus and getting drunk with Piet and Astradamors.
The Liceu chorus and orchestra under Michael Boder play Ligeti’s challenging score with vigor and verve, though the English diction is a bit muddy in some choral sections. Boder, who’s leaving the Barcelona company this year for the Royal Danish Theatre and Orchestra, is also featured in a bonus segment discussing the making of Grand Macabre.
Anyone who enjoyed the New York Philharmonic’s 2010 rendition of the work or who cares about contemporary opera will surely want this DVD for their library. The imaginative, often flip staging may also appeal to more casual listeners in the way William Kentridge’s staging of Shostakovich’s The Nose did at the Metropolitan Opera and the Festival d’Aix. Underneath all the cheekiness is a serious message, though, as well as a seemingly heartfelt homage to operatic conventions delivered by turning many of those very customs upside down.
Very interesting! and very well written and enjoyably so, Adriel.
Will read again tomorrow when I have more time, but Well Done.
Guess you had to be there (I saw it in Brussels). For me, it is first on my list of all-time great productions -- and that’s a rather long list. In the theater it has an astounding visual grandeur.
What’s this “pottymouth” stuff about? Titles in the opera (by the composer himself) “Shut up” “Arse Licker, Arse Kisser!” “Hurray, Hurray, My Wife is Dead, Hurray” “Up -- Drink! Up” “Away you Swag-pot.” Clearly Ligeti was sticking his finger in the eye of pompous types that think that opera “has a higher calling.”
Hannigan is one of the great singers -- and actors -- of my lifetime. The fact that she only works in contemporary opera means, of course, that the usual crew has never heard of her. She is starring in Benjamin’s new opera, “Written on Skin” in case anyone wants to explore something outside the 19th Century.
The obviously bulimic girl in the film is surrounded by junk-food wrappers and starts crawling to the toilet in distress when the frame freezes. That pose becomes the set which fills the entire prosenium. (The camera lingers on a Big Mac carton. Get it?) At the end, the girl looks great in the morning mirror after a night’s sleep. It was all a dream?
Young turk Barbara Hannigan is making quite a splash as Lulu in Brussels right now, unfortunately preventing her from singing the Amsterdam performances of Written on Skin. Without her, I just could no drag myself to that opera.
Especially not right after another modern opera “on a blind acupuncturist and the Baader Meinhof Gang”
http://concertagenda.radio4.nl/concert/608/pakkende-songs-met-diepgang.html
This was actually a very fine work. The wordl premiere of “Andreas weeps” by Peter-Jan Wagemans. The at times violent orchestration, combined with sentimental vocal lines, or strangely recited texts, and choral passages (sometimes sang into very cute mini megaphones) was very appropitate to the topic. The orchestra (bravo Michael Schønwandt!), and the singers were extremely well prepared. Wagemans seemed a little surpised at the enthousiastic reception of the piece. It is a work that will doubtlessly benefit by a staged performance, which I hope to see one day. The afternoon proved that opera is alive.
in case anyone wants to explore something outside the 19th Century.
The teeniest, tiniest bit patronising?
Put me down for 8 tickets.
Can’t wait.
I thought the point of the production (and the opera), was to totally subvert the “seriousness” of the “fear of death” and to point out how little that fear can actually impact our lives.
Redbear -- I don’t think Claudia was supposed to be bulimic (though it’s certainly possible). I think the video framing of the opera was mean to depict a person who doesn’t take care of herself: she eats a ton of McDonalds and other horrible foods, her house is a mess, she spends her evenings as a couch potato, and then she suddenly starts to feel seriously ill. So Claudia eats some crap and suddenly feels horribly ill -- the kind of sudden illness that makes you think “oh my god, I must be dying”; and her body, frozen in pain and horror becomes the opera set. In the end it turns out she just needed to fart or have a big poo (I don’t remember exactly).
I thought it was brilliant. Has that ever happened to you? It’s definitely happened to me. It probably helps to be slightly neurotic and/or a hypochondriac and to be really lazy about taking care of yourself. In those moments when you think you must be dying from your shitty eating habits, etc. you berate yourself for your lifestyle and your horrible habits, telling yourself what an idiot you are for not getting your life together. But the moment you realize, “Oh, it was just trapped wind, false alarm,” people generally go back to living the same shitty lifestyle they were living before. I think it was a great metaphor for the events of the opera.
I generally hate this kind of shit, but it’s a great song and SHE’S absolutely stunning…it all seems to work. What a cool singer.
She sounds wonderful in this Rossignol clip, too. She’s really smart to stick to this kind of limited rep. Sing rep that few can (or seem to want to), and do it better than everyone else = recipe for success.
Re: Barbara Hannigan: I was just made aware at another forum that arte.tv is streaming the opera Written On Skin by George Benjamin for twelve more days. Barbara Hannigan is in it and she’s terrific.
Here is the link:
http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/video/Written_On_Skin_Festival_Aix-en-Provence/
Coming out of Lurk-dom just to say: WHAT.THE.FUCK. LOLOL Good review Adriel, but I would have liked a bit more elaboration on this rather disturbing production.
Looking forward to seeing that “Becoming Traviata” Documentary when it is released outside NYC.
Oh and hurray for James Levine’s comeback!! Sadz that Natalie Dessay has officially announced her retirement
My apologies for my off-topic-ness. lol
OT :ALERT On BBC3 Die Walküre, live Acts I, II.
In 2 minutes!
We had this production in Roma three years ago -- during the intermission a friend said: just you watch it will rotate and they’ll be coming out her butt next! I didn’t believe him -- foolish me! But then he lived in Germany and was use to this sort of thing.
As the conductor entered for the 2nd act someone shouted “VIVA VERDI” and was roundly booed by a younger than normal audience for the Teatro dell’Opera.
It was an experience -- in both the good and bad sense of the word!
Glad Jane Eaglen is working again.