Last
night was apparently the last of the L.A. Opera’s ambitious Recovered Voices series, with Franz
Schreker’s The Stigmatized (or The Marked Ones) from 1918. The music is
an appealing late-Romantic synthesis of Wagner, Mahler, Verdi, Debussy … and
looks forward to Golden Age Hollywood movie music.
Robert
Brubaker, as the disabled Salvago, and Anja Kampe as Carlotta, were both
heroic, delivering maximum longing and ardor from Schreker’s score.
Ian
Judge’s production kept things moving. Instead of sets there were
projections—images of buildings, water, woods, etc. by Wendall K. Harrington
that were nice to look at, and completely appropriate.
The
only problem was Shreker’s libretto, which is outstandingly absurd, even for an
opera. And even worse, it’s completely unstageworthy, and fails to generate any
drama. Instead it provides lectures on art, long-winded narrations of unseen
events and completely unreal characters and situations. There
are also orgies, grottoes, human trafficking, and other kinds of naughtiness
that are handled with the usual theatrical hypocrisy of We’re Only Showing this
to Criticize It. After
an hour of trying to follow the plot I stopped reading the supertitles, and
enjoyed it more.
A
first-rate novelty, well-produced. It would be a shame if L.A. Opera doesn't continue this series.