Opera, Incorporated

A century ago, George Bernard Shaw spoofed the "Mesopotamian words" of the musicological breed of critic in his famous "Hamlet" mock-analysis: "Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage..." Now a whole new and thorny vocabulary has sprung up to obscure meaning as opera is subjected to criticism of the feminist, gender, queer and "body" varieties. Two rather daunting new volumes of such critique offer some fresh interpretations of familiar operatic texts but might communicate their ideas to a broader audience if we readers did not have to try to puzzle out the critic-speak in which they are presented.

Siren Songs, Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Mary Ann Smart, editor, Princeton University Press), a collection of gnomic essays based upon an academic conference, is a slow and frustrating read. Lawrence Kramer's "Opera: Two or Three Things I Know About Her," promises a connection between transgressive sexuality and bourgeois comfort in, of all places, Götterdämmerung, but his reasoning, by way of Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud, proved impossible for this reader to unravel. On the other hand, Philip Brett offers a stimulating overview of the evolution of the libretto to Peter Grimes, demonstrating how each successive draft shifted the emphasis from sexual predatation to political witchhunt. Other essays raise questions about possible feminist messages in Elisabeth's great aria in Don Carlos and various stagings of Mozart arias. Most detailed, and, perhaps not incidentally, most convincing, is Katherine Bergeron's "Melisande's Hair," a thoughtful look at Debussy's masterpiece as it was seen in the blatantly Freudian staging by Pierre Médecin at the Opéra-Comique.

More accessible to the lay reader is Bodily Charm: Living Opera (Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon; University of Nebraska Press), a thoughtful overview (with a minimum of jargon) of what the authors see as the essentially "Dionysian" nature of operatic performance. The key to their argument is that opera is a corporeal experience; it happens in the bodies of the performers and the audience; further, the subjects most often treated in opera are body-related, such as eating, drunkenness, illness and of course sex. A particularly interesting chapter examines the Romantic fascination with the grotesque body and especially how such works as Rigoletto and Lucrezia Borgia flew in the face of the Platonic identification of inner and outer beauty.

Where both these books stop short in their attempt to explain the meaning of opera is where most amateurs' interest begins: in actual performance of the works. True, the Hutcheons do note that sound recordings of opera essentially misrepresent the form, lacking, as they do, any connection to the physical bodies of the performers. However, none of the authors here take the next step, which is to examine how the variables of an individual artist's performance can color or even change outright the audience's perception of the meaning of the piece.

Perhaps an example is in order. Only last night I heard Olga Borodina sing Dalila at the Metropolitan Opera. She of course sang the notes and the words in the score as written, and she performed the prescribed stage movements and wore the costumes and wigs provided her. But the performance was her own creation. Mme. Borodina approaches the role lyrically, without any snarling chest tones or screamed high notes; neither does she indulge in the sidelong glances or "witchy" posturing so often associated with this part. Instead she performs with beauty, charm and a slight melancholy that curiously makes Dalila a more sympathetic character. In fact, at the moment when this Dalila begged Samson one last time for the secret of his power ("Quand je veux le savoir/Ce secret qui me blesse...") I found myself suddenly thinking, "She reminds me of Elsa entreating Lohengrin." The apparent sincerity Mme. Borodina found in the character suddenly made the often-ridiculed drama of Samson seem more complex and interesting: if I could believe her, even for an instant, why should not Samson? One artist's interpretative choice, then, altered for me the received meaning of the work.

Of course, this idea that the performer should shape the meaning of the work is hardly new; in fact, the until fairly recently one spoke of attending "Gobbi's Falstaff" or "Lehmann's Marschallin" as a matter of course. But today, that final artistic step is too often denied performers. The attitude unfortunately seems to be that an opera singer's job is simply to fulfill the intentions of the composer, conductor and stage director. But is it not the very essence of a performing art like opera that it should be as particular and specific as possible? Surely that very specificity can be gained only through the artistic input of the actual performer.

Nowadays young singers must be reminded that they are supposed to put something of themselves into their roles. I had the great pleasure earlier this year of sitting on a master class taught by Renata Scotto. The veteran artist was working with a young soprano on the mechanics of singing "Ah non credea mirarti" from La sonnambula. Scotto addressed some of the girl's technical deficiencies, telling her (and the audience) that one must have at one's fingertips the skills of bel canto, a pure legato, idiomatic pronunciation, etc. as a matter of course. "And then," she smiled, "All you have to do is to add your own personality, to make the part your own."

Mme. Scotto herself provided an object lesson in "adding her own personality" when she took on for the first time in her career the role of Klytämnestra in Elektra last year for the Baltimore Opera. Both musically and dramatically this piece is quite unlike any of the bel canto or verismo parts she is identified with. And she certainly has neither the sheer vocal force of a dramatic mezzo-soprano or the mythic presence of, say, an Astrid Varnay or a Regina Resnik. And so Scotto found another way of performing the part, lightly and delicately, as if Klytämnestra were a fragile aging belle -- a Marschallin gone to seed perhaps, or a Blanche du Bois of antiquity. Scotto's virtue-of-necessity half-tones and fluttering hand gestures harmonized beautifully with the Jugendstil filigree of Strauss's music and the purple imagery of Hoffmansthal's text. For once, in this one very specific performance, the balance of sympathy shifted radically from the confident, even butch Elektra of Marilyn Zschau to Scotto's Klytämnestra. The work took on an altered and intriguing meaning, ambiguous about exactly who (if anyone) is in the right in the troubled household of Atreus.

True, the concept of producer Roberto Oswald for this Elektra (it was set in a turn of the century Hospital for the Very Very Nervous) provided an opportunity for Scotto's interpretation to gain its validity. Unfortunately, far too many high-concept productions tend to limit singers' artistic opportunities; in fact, the producer's vision of the character may be the diametrical opposite of the performer's. Let us as an example, consider the case of a young lyric baritone, handsome and naturally elegant in movement and voice, who takes on the role of the Count in Le nozze di Figaro. From his reading of the score, he believes the Count is essentially not a bad fellow, only bored and somewhat spoiled. That is, of course, a perfectly valid way of looking at the character. But what happens when our hypothetical baritone is engaged by the Welsh National Opera to appear in their staging by Neil Armstrong -- in which the Count makes his first entrance barefoot in underwear and dressing gown, unshaven and disheveled, a "boorish bully," as Michael Kennedy writes (April, 2001 Opera). What qualities of his own can our young baritone bring to this version of the Count? What, indeed, can the singer do besides showing up, doing his job, collecting his check, and moving on to the next gig?

Artists who try to do more than "showing up and moving on" very quickly get pegged as difficult and uncooperative, not team players. It seems that by suggesting that a mere singer could have an artistic position as valid as that of a stage director or conductor is to commit a crime of lèse-majesté. Yes, it is true there are a select few singers whom conductors and producers are willing to accept as equals. Anja Silja, whose superbly detailed interpretation of Emilia Marty was heard in New York earlier this year, is one such artist whose artistic credentials are unquestioned by her operatic collaborators.

But most singers are not intellectuals like Silja; their creative process is far more intuitive. As the Hutcheons would say, singing is done with the body, not the mind. Unfortunately, working instinctively this way may make an artist appear willful or capricious. We have heard producer Jonathan Miller, for example, sneer at Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna as "Bonnie and Clyde" for what he sees as their whims. Joseph Volpe of the Metropolitan Opera retracted a contact when this pair protested his choice of producer. And yet, when they are in cordial artistic surroundings, Gheorghiu and Alagna are among the few performers of our era who can provide truly thrilling "star" opera, evenings of excitement and glamour reminiscent of whatever Golden Age you care to mention. And if their financial demands and sudden cancellations are also throwbacks to the Golden Age, well, I think it's worth the tradeoff.

Earlier this season, Mr. Alagna sang Don José in New York, regular repertory performances of the pedestrian Zeffirelli production of Bizet's opera. His idiosyncratic interpretation of the character as a spoiled and needy child was unlike any other Don José I have ever seen; in fact, without changing a note or a word, Mr. Alagna rewrote the opera. Now the story told of a confident and relatively stable woman (Mme. Borodina) stalked by a psychotic adolescent -- a shift of meaning due almost entirely to Mr. Alagna's bold vision of his character, expressed though tentative, unpredictable gestures and cajoling voix mixte.

Another "risky" tenor is José Cura; on an off night he can come off like a voiceless 8x10 glossy photograph, but when voice and personality are clicking, he can be, I think, the most exciting singer of opera today. Certainly his Samson with Washington Opera was a "demented" night (to use Ethan Mordden's useful term of supreme praise): Cura's feral voice and film-star physical attractiveness limned the tragedy of a political superman brought low by his own sexual urges. He whimpered the line "Dalila, Dalila, je t'aime" in a wavering falsetto, drunk with lust and trembling with self-loathing. In the lobby afterward, some of the audience openly and without irony compared Cura's Samson to President Clinton; I was left pondering the dilemma of the high-profile public figure (political or otherwise) who tries, with the best of intentions, to keep his sexuality compartmentalized, in the closet as it were.

Of course, some artistic ideas are more valid than others; very often, a singer's demands have no loftier goal than to please his loyal public. But opera is not only art, after all; it's entertainment, however "exotic and irrational" Dr. Johnson may have found it. In any field of show business, the public responds to vivid and exciting personalities, and opera-as-entertainment is no exception. While I personally may not care much for the art of a Cecilia Bartoli, I cannot deny that she brings pleasure to a great many people. She is, if nothing else, a star, a great personality who brings life and interest to the musical life of any season in which she appears.

And the star personality is an endangered species on today's operatic stages. Ira Siff, impresario of New York's travesty opera company La Gran Scena, has built his career on poking gentle fun at the idiosyncracies of great singers "from Scotto to Milanov. But," he says, "Those mannerisms exist in no singers today. I copped a wonderful breast pounding curtain call from Aprile Millo, who respects and recreates the grand style. But the rest of them are determined to be just plain folks who sing -- and often sound it. This doesn't mean they're not great singers. They're just not using that palette of expressive devices which to my ear and heart are the essential tools of communication."

The musical writings of GBS appeared on the eve of the Era of the Work, when such geniuses as Mahler and Toscanini would promote the operatic text to paramount importance. As we passed the halfway point of the century, stage directors proclaimed the ascent of The Concept. Is the 21st century to be the era of The Critique? Or should we not instead look forward to a return to the past, an era when the performances of great singers define the meaning of opera?

James Jorden