A serious production of Thaïs - readers uninterested in opera can skim right past this one - readers interested in opera, apply your best judgment

The entry on Thaïs, the 1894 Jules Massenet opera, in The New Grove Book of Operas (2000), ends with this:

The human truths contained in Thaïs have yet to be revealed either on stage or indeed on record; it is, in many ways, an opera still awaiting its first serious production.

I presume the entry has been revised since then.  I have seen a serious production of Thaïs, and am listening to it now.  Renée Fleming and Thomas Hampson recorded the opera in 2000 with a regional French orchestra.  I saw the production in Chicago in 2002 or 2003.  Hampson I saw several times in Chicago, but I believe this was the only time I have heard Fleming perform.

I would not want to put too much pressure on my memory of any opera I have seen, particularly one I had never heard.  I asked ma femme what she remembered, and she immediately said “the set” - a bright version of the Alexandria and the Egyptian desert, yellow, white, and blue (about two-thirds down, there it is) – “and not much else.”

How do I know it was a serious performance, then?  Back to the New Grove.  In the 1894 premiere, the star "'accidentally' exposed her breasts," and a 1973 performance featured "the first full-frontally nude opera singer."  Fleming remained clothed for her entire appearance.  If anything, the production was too static, except that the attention was then firmly on the interpretation of the music.  Really, I know the performers understand what they are singing, are “serious,” because I can hear what they’re doing on the recording.

I wrote and have abandoned a little exploration of the musical themes of the opera.  The only point worth keeping is that Massenet is clearly composing in a Wagnerian world.  Motifs run through the entire piece, performing the same thematic functions of a repeated color or phrase in a novel, except I can hum the motifs.  I am not a particularly sophisticated listener – after multiple plays of the recording, I have been able to pick out five themes.  I doubt that’s all of them.  The one the brass section plays at the beginning of the monk’s “Voilà donc la terrible cité” aria is blatantly ripped off of Tannhäuser (1845).  I think it’s Tannhäuser.

All of the motifs are blended together in the “Méditation religieuse,” a six-minute instrumental section in the exact center of the opera.  Thaïs has just been “converted” by the monk, has just decided to abandon her earthly life and return to the Christian church.  In France’s novel, this is a moment of catastrophic “victory” for the monk.  Massenet abandons the monk, and gives his attention to Thaïs, to her psychological state, which is quiet but ecstatic, and entirely wordless, aside from some off-stage humming.  France’s anti-clerical satire is entirely abandoned by Massenet.  In some sense, this eviscerates the novel.  All for the best.

I understand that the “Méditation religieuse” is popular at weddings.  It’s the moment when a courtesan resolves to become a nun, and a monk begins a life of erotic torment.  Ha ha ha!  But no one at the wedding will know that.

The Fleming and Hampson recording is highly recommended, although I wish there were a CD of highlights.

The Bride of Lammermoor and Lucia di Lammermoor

Ford Madox Ford on "the amateur literary hack" Walter Scott: "His literary merits are almost undiscoverable," and "We are no longer inclined to sit four hours over a book before the author will deign to give us some idea of what his story is." See The March of Literature, pp. 711-13 for more. Ford explicitly compares Scott to Flaubert, which will not get us very far with very many pre-Flaubert novels - let's leave that topic for another time.

In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley singles out and recommends The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Unfortunately, I don't remember why. The Bride of Lammermoor is a solid novel of thwarted love, with a good semi-Dickensian comic relief character who I find funny and an especially good climax. It's also short, for a Scott novel - 330 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. So far, so good. What's the problem?

The novel forms the basis for Donizetti's bel canto opera, Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia is a silly piece of work, in general, but it has one unbelievable scene, the main reason the opera is still performed (besides the popular sextet). The heroine is married against her will and goes mad. Her mad scene, amongst the wedding guests, is one of the greatest in opera history, several arias blended into a perfect twenty or thirty minutes. Ravishing, powerful, and such words. Ahead of its time.

Here's the thing. Lucia di Lammermoor is typically long, about two and a half hours. Opera-goers are patient folk, happily waiting for the choice bits. How much of The Bride of Lammermoor does the opera include? The last thirty pages. Of 330. Less than ten percent. The first 300 pages are squashed into the minimal exposition, or ignored.

Here's something I won't say very often: the librettist was right, completely right (hats off to Salvatore Cammarano). The real story of the novel doesn't get moving until the very end. The rest is filler, sometimes engaging, sometimes not. Maybe the novel couldn't function at all if it were trimmed down. But 300 pages to get to the good part - that's a lot to ask of a reader.

This hardly means The Bride of Lammermoor is not worth reading. You might agree with Jane Smiley rather than with me, and I'm glad I read it myself. But it would take special pleading to get me to reread it.

Old Curiosity Shop curiosities

Edgar Allan Poe, in his review of The Old Curiosity Shop, takes a good crack at a common misunderstanding of Dickens:

"There are other admirably drawn characters - but we note these for their remarkable originality, as well as for their wonderful keeping, and the glowing colors in which they are painted. We have heard some of them called caricatures- but the charge is grossly ill-founded. No critical principle is more firmly based in reason than that a certain amount of exaggeration is essential to the proper depicting of truth itself. We do not paint an object to be true, but to appear true to the beholder. Were we to copy nature with accuracy the object copied would seem unnatural." (Essays and Reviews, Library of America, p. 215)

The minor characters of Dickens are almost always as vigourous as anyone else's full-rounded major characters. It takes so little, in the right hands, to breathe life into a fictional character - the right gesture, the right phrase.

Quilp the dwarf has an unnamed errand boy with two characteristics: he is the only person who can talk back to Quilp with impunity, and he walks on his hands at every opportunity. Is he a one-dimensional character, or does this count as two dimensions? Regardless, in the novel, in the imagination, he lives.

***

Poe's conclusion, after a lot of perfectly legitimate dismantling of the novel's structure: "Upon the whole we think the 'Curiosity Shop' very much the best of the works of Mr. Dickens. It is scarcely possible to speak of it too well." (p. 217)

I doubt many Dickens readers would agree today - as I argued earlier, the taste for sentiment has probably receded too far. Even among the early novels, most would now prefer the more clear-eyed Pickwick Papers, or more unified Oliver Twist. We also have some idea of the masterpieces to come, which must affect our judgment.

***

The Old Curiosiy Shop was published in weekly installments. The first stage adaptation appeared almost immediately, not only before the story had ended, but almost before it had begun - before, as an example, Dickens had even introduced the villain, Quilp. So the contemporary reader, after enjoying the latest installment of the novel, could then go to the theater to see a completely different story (I think a sort of drawing room mystery) with the same title and two or three of the same characters.

The play was popular and ran the length of the serialization of the novel. At some point, it was rewritten to arbitrarily insert more of the characters from the novel, but the story was never changed. Very strange.

***

Dickens' own performance of the end of the novel was one of his showstoppers when he did public readings. The audience, weeping and sobbing, would get an hour of The Death of Little Nell, followed by a seventy minute Christmas Carol, to cheer them up.

Why I read Knut Hamsun, and why I don't

Here's a Sven Birkerts review of two Knut Hamsun novels, Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917).

Hunger is a first-rate novel, narrow but original and rich in ideas. It's about a starving writer who wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) thinking, about his writing, or about what he can sell to get money (for example, can he sell his buttons but keep the rest of his coat?). Over four chapters, his situation becomes worse and worse. But he refuses to surrender his integrity, however he defines it. The tension and hallucinatory, hysterical tone sometimes resembles Dostoevsky, but the attention to detail and the intellectual concerns of the novel are in a different world. A great book.

Growth of the Soil is an "agrarian" novel that won Hamsun the Nobel prize, but I haven't read it, for the simple reason that the Nazis liked it. This hasn't kept me from enjoying Wagner or Nietzsche, so there's no consistency here. I could be convinced. But for now, no.

Two movie recommendations:

1. Hamsun, in his old age, was a Nazi collaborator, actively supporting the Quisling government in Norway. The movie Hamsun (1996) covers this terrible story. Hamsun is played by Max von Sydow, reason enough to see the movie.

2. There's a Danish version of Hunger (1966) starring another superb Swedish actor, Per Oscarsson. The movie is a serious adaptation, trying to recreate the internal state of the character. Really well done.

These are both available through Netflix, amazingly.

A lovely travesty at the Vienna Staatsoper

Meine Frau and I saw a production of Massenet’s Werther (1892) in the legendary, historic, blah blah blah, Vienna Staatsoper. The production, although not insane, included the usual attention deficit disorder- induced decisions (set the story in the 1950s, put a working television on stage, why not?) They were in keeping with the main curtain or drop which had images of Popeye and the Incredible Hulk on it.*

The story, the adaptation, of The Sorrows of Young Werther was unbelievable, a disgrace, the creation of someone who apparently actively hated Goethe’s story and wanted to destroy it. A bizarre and inappropriate Christmas theme runs through the entire opera. Charlotte is given a younger sister who has a crush on Werther. And the entire last act is the final meeting between Werther and Charlotte, after (after!) Werther has fatally shot himself. That last act is a travesty, really.

But that last act (most of the previous act as well), a long duet between the two leads, was also a sort of pure flow of song that was basically as beautiful as any opera I know. I was best off ignoring the subject, ignoring the words entirely, just luxuriating in the singing.

Werther was sung by the young Spaniard Rolando Villazón. He was not the most forceful tenor I’ve ever heard, but he had an amazing clarity, a perfect tone. The Viennese audience applauded him as soon as he came to the fore of the stage, before he had sung a note, which I found weird, but he’d earned the applause by the end. Sophie Koch was Charlotte, almost as good.

Opera fans put up with a lot of nonsense. Maybe that’s true of fans of anything, 19th century literature included.

*In general, Vienna felt genuinely elegant. So I can’t explain this lapse.

Popup books and puppets - Redmoon Theater's Hunchback

Ma femme and I were lucky enough to see Hunchback in Chicago on Saturday, the Redmoon Theater production of Notre Dame de Paris. Redmoon is known for creating spectacles, often wordless or nearly so, with lots of odd homemade devices and off-kilter scaffoldings. The company creates amazing images, but I have found that their storytelling does not always amount to much.

The adaptation of Hugo took care of that problem. The story could hardly be stronger, and the acrobatics, the puppets, the masks, and the pop-up books were all used to tell the story, not replace it. I was most impressed when, after a half hour or so of nearly wordless action, the Author shows up on stage to deliver a lecture on medieval Paris architecture. This is actually right out of the book!*

Whoever had the first had the idea to put a giant pop-up book on stage, and then use it as a mini-stage for marionettes, was some sort of genius. A charming, intimate effect. After the performance, the audience is invited onstage, and can play around with the puppets themselves.

If you find yourself in Chicago before January 20, try to see this show.

* Anyone bogged down in Tolstoy's historical lectures in War and Peace can shift some of the blame to the architecture chapter of Notre Dame de Paris.