TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/021389/02138900.070

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 133 lines

MUSIC, Page 73

Opera Blooms in Brooklyn

A bold new venture begins at a house older than the Met

By Otto Friedrich


    Terrible are the humiliations that Shakespeare inflicts on the
aging Sir John Falstaff. Stuffed into a hamper of dirty laundry to
escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously
flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the
supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In
setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist,
Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him
impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the
fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened.
Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors and soared into
space, a paunchy carouser suddenly transformed into a kind of pagan
god of pleasure.

    That was the most remarkable of the many striking effects in
German director Peter Stein's production of Falstaff, with which
the celebrated Welsh National Opera was making its American debut.
But the applause that swept the amiably musty BAM theater was not
just for Stein. Nor just for Donald Maxwell's passionate
performance as Sir John. Nor even just for the smiling Princess of
Wales, Princess Di herself, who appeared in a glowing white satin
dress for the black-tie benefit. Also to be applauded and
celebrated was the start of a new kind of opera season in a place
where opera has been something of a rarity.

    BAM intends to present each year a limited season of varied
and offbeat repertory, using its midsize (2,000 seats) theater as
well as the more intimate (900 seats) Majestic a few blocks away.
BAM officials like to boast that their house has actually been
staging opera since 1861, more than two decades before the mighty
Metropolitan Opera was born. But in fact the whole place nearly
died during the 1950s. Its revival in recent years has depended
heavily on presentations of theater and dance, along with stagings
of operas by contemporary composers like Philip Glass and John
Adams, in its annual Next Wave Festival of avant-garde work. But
BAM is now convinced (perhaps by the conventionality of many
productions at the Met and even at the New York City Opera) that
there are further new ways to be tried.

    "There is so much interesting opera that could and should play
in a theater of 2,000 seats instead of 4,000," says BAM opera
artistic director Matthew Epstein. "The visual and musical values
are different than in a bigger house, and now the gigantism of the
'70s is turning around. These are troubled times for the bigger
houses in Paris, London, Vienna. Some of the most exciting work
today is being done in smaller theaters like Cardiff or Brussels.
There is less emphasis on superstars and more on ensemble."

    Cardiff, of course, is where the new Falstaff was born (last
September), after the Welsh National Opera spent years courting
Stein, who made his reputation at Berlin's famous Schaubuhne
theater. Stein saw Falstaff as an intensely personal drama, clearly
sexual and even slightly sadistic. "Hold your paunch, celebrate
it," he instructed Maxwell at one point during rehearsals. "For
Falstaff, it is not grossness, it is greatness, virility." Bearing
out Epstein's point, the modest dimensions of the BAM theater
enabled Stein to stage Verdi's last masterpiece as a kind of
chamber work, with the stage action fast-moving and intricately
choreographed. The closeness of the proceedings also gives added
prominence to Richard Armstrong's intense and hard-driving
conducting of what is perhaps Verdi's most complex orchestral
score.

    BAM officials plan not only to acquire productions from Europe
and from such U.S. opera companies as St. Louis, Chicago and San
Francisco but also to create new stagings of their own -- and
starting in 1991, to collaborate on experimental productions with
the Met. Planned for the first Met-BAM season: Gluck's Orfeo ed
Euridice and a new Adams opera based on the Achille Lauro
hijacking.

    For the rest of this season, though, BAM already has two very
unusual projects in the works. The first, at the Majestic in March,
is the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht,
a small-scale early draft of their corrosive parable, The Rise and
Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The eccentric director Peter Sellars
has eccentrically decided to combine this with the same singers
performing eight Bach choral works. But the piece de resistance,
which just finished two weeks of performances in Paris and is due
in Brooklyn in May, is a 313-year-old opera that almost nobody had
heard of for the past couple of centuries. It is Atys by
Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to King Louis XIV, and it is
a marvel.

    This baroque gem might have remained under its layers of dust
indefinitely except that 1987 marked the 300th anniversary of
Lully's death (of an infection that started after he accidentally
stabbed himself in the foot with the cane he was using to conduct
his music). The anniversary-loving French authorities decided to
join with those in Lully's native Italy to finance a hearing for
the man who is considered the virtual inventor of French opera.

    That idea led to the cherubic figure of William Christie, 44,
a transplanted American with a passion for neglected composers like
Lully. With degrees from both Harvard and Yale, Christie went to
France nearly two decades ago to be a harpsichordist (he had been
a student of Ralph Kirkpatrick), then founded a flourishing chamber
ensemble called Les Arts Florissants, then became the first
American professor at the Paris Conservatoire.

    Faced with the challenge of how to celebrate Lully, Christie
took the librettos of more than a dozen of the composer's tragedies
lyriques to a house in the country, read through them all and
decided that the most exciting one was Atys. Based on Ovid, the
drama by Philippe Quinault concerns the return to earth by Cybele,
a fertility goddess, for the wedding of King Celenus. The goddess
has fallen in love with the king's friend Atys, only to find that
Atys is secretly in love with the prospective bride, so she
vengefully drives Atys mad. In his madness, he kills the bride,
then recovers, sees what he has done, and kills himself. Though
this is acted out by antique gods and lords (all costumed in the
capes and wigs of the Louis XIV era), Christie found "the
theatrical effect so strong that an Eskimo could understand what's
happening." As for Lully's elegantly stately music, Christie
considers it "wrenchingly beautiful."

    And so it is, particularly when performed by the young
musicians of Les Arts Florissants, who play Baroque trills on their
lutes and viols with all the enthusiasm that Gunther Schuller's
student band used to bring to Scott Joplin's rags. No less
important is BAM President Harvey Lichtenstein's recollection of
a performance he attended in France: "I watched Christie conducting
in the pit, and the smile never left his face once."

    Lichtenstein's plans are ambitious, and the big problem, as
always with opera, is money. Falstaff and Atys each cost nearly $1
million for four performances. But Lichtenstein is a master fund
raiser who has increased BAM's budget more than 15-fold (to some
$11 million this season) during his two decades in charge. Says he,
with a grin: "I am very confident."