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Baden-Baden 1927
Oct. 24th, 2013 09:22 amLast night I attended the premiere of Gotham Chamber Opera's "Baden-Baden 1927", a four opera bill reproducing the bill of the 1927 Baden-Baden Festival, which featured premieres of one-act operas by four contemporary composers- Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud, and Ernst Toch.
That's a lot of star power for a single bill. The 'one act operas' ranged in length from eight minutes to about twenty minutes, but each one packed a wallop. Each was a fascinating and challenging work. Though I had objection to some of the stagings, the music and the acting was sufficiently strong that I found great value in all of them.
First up was Milhaud's "The Abduction of Europa", a miniature reenactment of that Greek myth about Zeus's seduction whilst disguised as a bull of the maiden Europa. Basically it was all about dirtybadwrong sex, the music playing up the lustful engagement of Zeus and Europa in hearty romantic overtones while the voices of conservatism protested feebly in the background. Amusingly, the production tried to emphasize the questions the opera was allegedly trying to answer about the nature of art, staging it in an art gallery at an exhibition of Baselitz, the various characters dressed as patrons at a gala cocktail party. At best, we could say this opera constituted an utter rejection of that artistic regime: art cannot be contained by a gallery. Art is the aesthetic appreciation of the world's beauty, wherever it appears, and those who seek to put it on a stage or in a box are like those trying to cage a bull.
Next came the one whose staging I found most inappropriate. Ernst Toch's "The Princess and the Pea" was produced as if it were on the set of a reality TV show. The connection they were attempting to draw out was between the opera's questions about the ineffable nature of 'princessness' and our own questions about the ineffable nature of reality tv stardom. But composed in 1927 by an Austrian Jew and premiered in Germany, shortly after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire, this is a story about Democracy and Monarchism, and... I find it hard to believe that a question about the artfulness of reality TV was the best they could think of to emphasize the contemporary relevance of the libretto's questions about blood quantum and hereditary succession. Set it in Pakistan amidst the Bhutto Dynasty. Make everyone a Kennedy. Or if you really want to stir shit, and believe me these four composers did when they wrote these works, make 'princessness' an analogue of 'Aryanness', show the King and Queen questioning whether the foreign princess is blonde and blue eyed enough to marry their son.
That said, the singing was really spectacular in this opera. Everyone was extraordinarily committed to performing their roles, to making these fairy tale figures into real people with genuine and comprehensible motives driving their actions and reactions.
After intermission, we got Paul Hindemith's musical palindrome "There and Back", in which a domestic scene quickly goes desperately wrong, and then a divine intervention sends the whole scene moving in reverse line by line, until the opera ends with the beginning again of the placid domestic scene.
This was staggering. The way the music, the staging, the acting, the lighting, the scenario all fit together was just spectacular, and moving, and thought provoking, and funny, and tragic. In twelve minutes, with characters we knew barely more than two random people off the street, we were given so much movement and feeling. "There and Back" is exactly how storytelling is supposed to work. It was almost miraculous.
Though Hindemith is known for difficult, inaccessible, moody orchestral music, the score here was light, vaudevillian, and melodramatic, but extraordinarily well put together. I've long argued that experimental art teaches you an incredible amount about how to construct conventional art by the rules, since you learn when and how to break the rules and when as how to abide by them, and I think this opera validated that argument. The music's movement between domesticity and jealousy and rage was seamless and perfect in both directions.
And then finally we got Kurt Weill's "Mahagonny Songspiel", a savage parody of Weimar morality in six lush songs. I think it is a difficult piece to stage operatically, because it is not quite a narrative, and I think GCO did a pretty good job of presenting it as it is, with repeated characters from song to song but with each piece a self-contained artistic set piece requiring its own sort of visual-musical space. A particular visual highlight was an homage to the OKGO treadmill video, constituting a far more successful artistic linkage between 1927 and today than those attempted in The Princess and the Pea. If anything, it deepened my appreciation of the OKGO video by adding to the treadmill metaphor a sense that 'going again' without advancing was an actual political expression of frustration.
In sum, a great revival by GCO, and one I am very happy to have seen. Several of the works performed may now see Yuletide nominations from me next year. I think I would be particularly excited by "There and Back" fic.
That's a lot of star power for a single bill. The 'one act operas' ranged in length from eight minutes to about twenty minutes, but each one packed a wallop. Each was a fascinating and challenging work. Though I had objection to some of the stagings, the music and the acting was sufficiently strong that I found great value in all of them.
First up was Milhaud's "The Abduction of Europa", a miniature reenactment of that Greek myth about Zeus's seduction whilst disguised as a bull of the maiden Europa. Basically it was all about dirtybadwrong sex, the music playing up the lustful engagement of Zeus and Europa in hearty romantic overtones while the voices of conservatism protested feebly in the background. Amusingly, the production tried to emphasize the questions the opera was allegedly trying to answer about the nature of art, staging it in an art gallery at an exhibition of Baselitz, the various characters dressed as patrons at a gala cocktail party. At best, we could say this opera constituted an utter rejection of that artistic regime: art cannot be contained by a gallery. Art is the aesthetic appreciation of the world's beauty, wherever it appears, and those who seek to put it on a stage or in a box are like those trying to cage a bull.
Next came the one whose staging I found most inappropriate. Ernst Toch's "The Princess and the Pea" was produced as if it were on the set of a reality TV show. The connection they were attempting to draw out was between the opera's questions about the ineffable nature of 'princessness' and our own questions about the ineffable nature of reality tv stardom. But composed in 1927 by an Austrian Jew and premiered in Germany, shortly after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire, this is a story about Democracy and Monarchism, and... I find it hard to believe that a question about the artfulness of reality TV was the best they could think of to emphasize the contemporary relevance of the libretto's questions about blood quantum and hereditary succession. Set it in Pakistan amidst the Bhutto Dynasty. Make everyone a Kennedy. Or if you really want to stir shit, and believe me these four composers did when they wrote these works, make 'princessness' an analogue of 'Aryanness', show the King and Queen questioning whether the foreign princess is blonde and blue eyed enough to marry their son.
That said, the singing was really spectacular in this opera. Everyone was extraordinarily committed to performing their roles, to making these fairy tale figures into real people with genuine and comprehensible motives driving their actions and reactions.
After intermission, we got Paul Hindemith's musical palindrome "There and Back", in which a domestic scene quickly goes desperately wrong, and then a divine intervention sends the whole scene moving in reverse line by line, until the opera ends with the beginning again of the placid domestic scene.
This was staggering. The way the music, the staging, the acting, the lighting, the scenario all fit together was just spectacular, and moving, and thought provoking, and funny, and tragic. In twelve minutes, with characters we knew barely more than two random people off the street, we were given so much movement and feeling. "There and Back" is exactly how storytelling is supposed to work. It was almost miraculous.
Though Hindemith is known for difficult, inaccessible, moody orchestral music, the score here was light, vaudevillian, and melodramatic, but extraordinarily well put together. I've long argued that experimental art teaches you an incredible amount about how to construct conventional art by the rules, since you learn when and how to break the rules and when as how to abide by them, and I think this opera validated that argument. The music's movement between domesticity and jealousy and rage was seamless and perfect in both directions.
And then finally we got Kurt Weill's "Mahagonny Songspiel", a savage parody of Weimar morality in six lush songs. I think it is a difficult piece to stage operatically, because it is not quite a narrative, and I think GCO did a pretty good job of presenting it as it is, with repeated characters from song to song but with each piece a self-contained artistic set piece requiring its own sort of visual-musical space. A particular visual highlight was an homage to the OKGO treadmill video, constituting a far more successful artistic linkage between 1927 and today than those attempted in The Princess and the Pea. If anything, it deepened my appreciation of the OKGO video by adding to the treadmill metaphor a sense that 'going again' without advancing was an actual political expression of frustration.
In sum, a great revival by GCO, and one I am very happy to have seen. Several of the works performed may now see Yuletide nominations from me next year. I think I would be particularly excited by "There and Back" fic.