My Heart is What?

"My heart is inditing of a good matter; I speak of the things which I have made unto the King. Kings' daughters were among the honourable women. Upon thy right hand did stand the Queen in vesture of gold, and the King shall have pleasure in thy beauty. Kings shall be thy nursing fathers and Queens thy nursing mothers."

Certainly the text of Handel's Third Coronation Anthem is as offensive to some people as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, (a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine) is to many committed Catholics, and yet the piece is trotted out and performed by venerable early and late music ensembles around the country without a protest banner in sight.

George II

Handel wrote four large choral/orchestral anthems for performance at the coronation of George II and his wife Caroline in 1727. The first, Zadok the Priest, has been performed at every coronation in England since then. All four are often performed in concert, which is an interesting anthropological study in cognitive dissonance.

It is shocking that a 21st century American audience should be interested in four pieces of music celebrating the handing over of power to an unelected foreigner, unless that interest be to ridicule them as hopelessly out of touch. Grandeur and pomp is one thing; we have plenty of that of our own, but when the text of the third announces "Upon thy right hand did stand the Queen in vesture of gold, and the King shall have pleasure in thy beauty" all but the religious right wing must surely recoil at the antiquated sentiment of male dominance/female servility; one might go so far as to accuse Handel of being in bed with the cosmetics industry. This is a historical artifact that is interesting to peruse, to examine for its successful elements and then to discard.

What exactly is the meaning of performing this piece? Is it an equal question to ask what is the meaning of regarding a painting of the same coronation, or reading an account of the occasion? I would answer no, because a modern performance is only tangentially mindful of the original circumstances; the historical details are probably listed in the program notes for the bored or the lonely to peruse at their leisure. The focus is not on a historical reenactment, and in fact I would argue that the audience's ignorance of the original context is at least in part key to the performance's success.

Do we treat this Coronation Anthem the same way that we treat literature or pictorial art from the same period? Gulliver's Travels was first published in 1726, the year before the coronation, and is more likely to have been experienced by anyone alive today not as a book but as a live-action TV drama, radio show or animated cartoon. The original is more likely to be compulsory reading on courses covering the early history of the novel, along with Moll Flanders, Pamela and Clarissa.

Cpt Thomas Coram by Hogarth

William Hogarth (1697 - 1764) is an artist who stands apart from his contemporaries because of the moralizing tone of his output. His work as a portrait painter is overshadowed by the groups of paintings, etchings and engravings that ridicule the mores of his day. For example, the series of engravings called The Rake's Progress and the print series called Industry and Idleness and The Four Stages of Cruelty are examples of witty commentary to which modern cartoonists aspire. What we remember most about his output is the daring critique of society that he took on beyond his day job.

So what element of the Handel are we celebrating? While Swift is satirizing human nature by remonstrating against the extent of human gullibility, and Hogarth is warning of society's moral decay, what is Handel doing besides providing lubricant Muzak for the aristocracy? If so, what is the meaning of the piece to a 21st century American audience?


 

Playing with the Big Boys

Reports are coming in that the Metropolitan Opera's new tech-heavy production of The Ring has ambitions beyond its ability to deliver; the rainbow bridge that should afford the gods entry victoriously but callously to their new castle across the river fails to materialize, and the poor bedraggled band is left to seek out a Donner Party-like solution to its predicament while the orchestra blazes with triumph and the curtain slowly falls.

In an economic downturn that is the worst since the Great Depression, even the big boys are setting their sights too high. In his recent op-ed piece in the New York Times Wagner for a Song, Alex Ross tries to argue that spending multi-millions of dollars on the new Met production is worth the investment, and yet he lets on in the last line that only a handful of people might benefit from the endeavor. A scandalous admission such as that is worthy of Wotan himself, supremely out of touch with the reality of the lives in the parallel universes his stage buddies occupy.

Is there no place in opera for the imagination? Are audiences so meager in their capacity to suspend their disbelief that the rainbow bridge must appear in fact and not in suggestion? Must millions of dollars be spent to mount this opera? The waste of the Met's production is the effort to produce (or on Monday night, fail to produce) for $16M what the imagination will produce for free.

In the 19th century, summoning up a rainbow bridge was guaranteed to get the audience saucer-eyed because there were no other comparable visual experiences. Unused to the wizardry of the movie industry, audiences were easily impressed by stage devices that we today would find quaint or silly.  Now, opera's rival is film, and in a world where anyone can be transported across the universe and back for less than $10 it is an easy bet who is going to come off looking slick and fabulous and who is going to come off looking like a cut-price educational video.

Computer animation has handed Hollywood a first class ticket on the Simulated Reality Express and opera cannot afford to come along. Grand Opera came of age with the steam locomotive; its milieu is the Pullman Car and the leisurely chugging-along tour of the countryside, not a rocket-powered intergalactic fantasy ride, unless it has Hollywood's financial resources to invest, which at the moment it does not, and perhaps never should.

Opera is not a realistic medium. People do not sing when they are stabbed, crowds of onlookers never comment in unison on dramatic events. The world of artifice is the world of the imagination, and appealing to the audience's imagination would be doing them a better service than conjuring up more and more elaborate and expensive engines and costumes. As the prologue to Henry V has it in his appeal to the budgetary constraints of the time, "Think when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; for 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings."

Shakespeare's concerns are both practical and financial; the Globe Theatre couldn't possibly contain the number of actors necessary to do justice to a reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt, but more importantly his troupe simply did not have the cash to invest without making a mockery of the attempt. He commands the audience to "suppose" and "think" to make up the budgetary short-fall.

The chain of rivalry is a long one. The big boy opera houses look to the movies and end up staging budget Indiana Jones remakes, the small time opera companies look to the big boys and end up putting on a show in the barn, and the big loss is the credibility of opera as a medium.

Living within our operatic means would entail understanding the historical and anthropological context in which we live and would transform the world of opera. It would reduce dependence on the latest technical gadgetry, it would energize the audience and engage them with the music, and it would challenge directors to stage the music and not stage a movie of the music. It would encourage composers to write with practicalities in mind, and it might stimulate some talk about what 'get real' means to an opera singer.

Caroline Herschel Confronts the Universe

Galilea

Are there too many stars, you angry sky,
that you should grant me stewardship? Suppose
I do not care to interrupt our world,
give birth with Mary to a larger life
that, cuckoo-like, will hurl me from the nest.
Discovery? You think I long to find
that we are sacrificed to a greater good?
If curiosity's rewarded by
endangerment, let me inquire no more,

and ignorant of things beyond my door

I'll never ask another question.

What if the end is lost? This house’s
bright magnificence replaced?
This garden’s ordered luxury
uprooted? Every plant and tree
disorganized, the roses scuffed,
alignments skewed? What once was soft,
maternal will be critical,
obtuse, unloving, blank, and all
my husbandry dismembered. To
accommodate uncertainty
involves a death, as birds make room
for cuckoo babies in the womby
nest, their mother full believing
all will make it out alive.
Finding a brother in the bed
Pushes the weaker out. Such bad
developments are not undone
by wanting. What is here is gone.

Hold close your objects of desire,
Elsewise they will be blown as air
inflates the thunderclouds to chase
the rain across the heavens. Choose
to grasp what doesn’t change most dear
against your heart, for there’s a door
into a secret garden full
of unimagined flowers. Feel
and smell them, think them in their beds,
design their courts, their ranks, their buds
and blooms in proud display, but keep
them in your head, lest they escape
to overwhelm your ordered rows.
Danger uncovers what your eyes
have overlooked; the fearless search
intoxicates, the finding, such
unusual air, now making way’s
the way, all changes, otherwise
what stays the same will stay the same
beyond its time, and time will seem
distasteful of its charge.

      The air

is still, the night has turned its ear
to listen; lawn and leaf await
the wet and weighted morning. What
relief is working upwards through
its rocky, grassy vigil? Hear;               
the earth is groaning, waiting her
release, like childbirth, agonized
but numbed to pain’s convulsing noisy
grinding spasms. What’s your word?
That everything decays towards
a better future? Dawn renews
my brighter death. How do I know
what is surrendered to the night
will be returned unharmed, and not
released, erased, struck, voided. Hear 
me, you too-patient trumpets. Here
you give your life to sleep in trust
that seeds will waken into trees,
that trees will sacrifice their fruit
for seed to carry on. But frost
may interpose, and circumstance
will freeze the cycle into stones
that disallow your vital breath.
What if another plant is bred
that saps the necessary room;
will you resist? Will you uproot
your enemy and save the wealth
of space for keeping? Heaven is wide;
wider than I am made of. Fear
confronts me that I need room for
expanding, but my time is small
and ordered, and my heart wants still.

Such space, such silence. As black caves
of swimmers shimmer when there comes
a guiding candle, or the gloom
of unexperienced time is gleamed
through with light when first espied
with naive hope. What secrecy
is here? What hidden horrors lurk
beyond the scope of where I look,
to smash the maps and tear apart
what’s good, what’s beautiful. 

                                                 My part
is done, I wash my hands of all
its consequences, holy hell
bear witness, here is far enough.
There are no more unknowns, my nerve
will not allow it. Venture on
you foolish souls to fly alone.

So beautiful the sky,
so infinite its reach.
To float, to fly beyond
my earthbound static pull
would free the senses, drain
the mind of gravity,
release all fear, propel
me floating onward, up,
insensate, benumbed bliss.
O carry me along
incorporate, divine,
in freedom, parallel
to all the chains of earth
and let me scour the stars
that oversee our time.  

Come heaviness,
your living mass
must animate
itself. Be mute,
all voices shrieking
shrillness. Strike
out, dumb fear, through
these limbs that they
might swing afresh
and in the rush
regenerate
new life, whose righteousness
will work
a flame to wake
enlightenment.
Come, fill my mind
with stars. My heart
expands with the heat
of birthing joy.
Rejoice! Would you
believe in gods
more solid, goods
more tactile? Now
is all I know
and need. Let fear
unlock what faith
requires. I’ll swim
the sea, and some
will swim behind
that also heed
the heavenly call.
Who dares to follow
follow where
the bright stars are.
If dangerous
the path, what is
another way?
To wonder why
the unbounded void
has dared invade
my dance, extended
its graceful hand
into this life
just so to leave
a challenge. I
pluck up the day
that I am healed
by cherishing, hold
this fragrance close
in my embrace.
There are two paths
and both are possible
but one
of them leads on,
the other fails,
although it feels
the same. Do not
be fooled, the night
is filled with stars
and streams and stairs
that lead you on
or take you in.
Tonight's my time
my chance to turn,
to good what yet
has languished.
You, challenger,
slow voyager
across the sky,
discovery’s
a doorway down
into the dawn
that fades beyond
and comes to an end
in rapturous
white light. Release
me, earth, for flight
and in the flooding
new and good
I’ll turn to gold.

New Nostalgia. Again.

You have to hand it to Placido Domingo, the General Director of the Los Angeles Opera. In June 2010 he loses $6 MILLION on an ill-conceived and ill-executed production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and yet in September 2010 he is starring in the premiere of an opera that was commissioned to highlight his talents.

Riding the American wave of Actor-Presidents, Movie-Star-Governors and Comedian-Politicians, Domingo is the Tenor-Executive, the Singer who is presumed to know his way around the board room and the donors' dining room as well as the stage. Yet the Ring's staggering financial loss is in part due to his managerial absence, having taken on the role of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the Los Angeles run; clearly a conflict of interest was at play here.

Domingo, as Neruda, listening to the Postino

And now, the apology for the Ring fiasco is Il Postino, a faithful operatic adaptation of the 1994 film, by Spanish composer Daniel Catan. This sumptuous, old-fashioned romantic opera sets back the clock at least 100 years, labeling opera once again as the expensive playground of the dilettante classes. It is a challenge-free audience pleaser, unabashedly modeled on the most successful and longer-lasting works that Puccini wrote between 1900 and 1910. Rich with cut-price romantic lyricism, it is a surefire cozy hit, a cheeky Mediterranean mea culpa that restores opera to its role of the safe vanilla artform.

• First of all, anyone who loses $6M because he was not minding the store should be fired immediately.
• Secondly, if the only reason to turn a movie into an opera is to provide a singer with an opportunity to show off, you should spend your money on something else, especially if that singer should have been fired in the first place (see 'First of all'.)
• Thirdly, and most importantly, the lesson that audiences will take away from Il Postino is that opera is trivial, that it is a Victorian nostalgic irrelevance, and that it is a harmless divertissement for the upper classes to waste their money and time on.

Historicist art is art that repeats safe and successful models from the past; it appeals to the cowardly because there is no risk. There is no risk of exposure to real emotion because the veneer of nostalgia prevents interaction with anything in the present day.

In the 1960s it was standard practice to keep children away from funerals because it would harm them. Steering audiences away from interaction with the present day by anesthetizing them with nostalgia is a similar, over-protective move, and is certainly not introducing people to art, it is letting them slip into a coma of entertainment that masquerades as art. But do not be fooled; art is at the intersection of the temporal and the eternal, not at the intersection of capitalism and celebrity.

Great singers deliver themselves and their emotions, they don't merely sing about them, great composers deliver themselves and their stories, they don't describe them. Great opera poses a threat to the emotions of the stunted or inexperienced, which is why charlatans have to hide behind petty make-believe rather than risk the exposure of a true encounter with a potentially life-changing medium.

Thankfully time will weed out disingenuousness and all this play-acting will fall away.