Silverlake Blvd.

Eugene Onegin @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

If Jane Austen ever wrote an opera libretto, it would probably have turned out something like Onegin. Very sympathetic, but at the same time, clear-sighted. It zips along in a sequence of concise scenes, each of which makes its point, very like her novels.

 

Even the setting and characters were Austenesque: a respectable widow and her two eligible daughters in the country, getting disrupted by the arrival of two attractive bachelors. Tatiana is dreamy, romantic Russian Marianne Dashwood, and Olga is a very silly Lydia Bennett. Lensky is a poet cousin of Mr. Bingley. Eugene himself is a mix of Mr. Darcy and Wickham.

 

On the other hand, JA would never countenance Lensky’s death. And she would have disapproved of Tatiana writing a love letter to Eugene, but would have certainly appreciated the dramatic impact that Tchaikovsky extracts from it.

 

It's a full-blown grand opera, but at the same time is something very different: an opera that ends with the heroine admitting that she loves the hero, but then tells him to please go away. And then she leaves him. The end.

 

Tatiana and Eugene suffer—Tchaikowsky makes that unmistakable—but their sufferings are not presented, as in Wagner, as part of the cosmic scheme of things. Nor are they presented, as in Puccini, as the intensity that makes life worthwhile. The failure of Tatiana and Eugene to find happiness with each other is presented as the result of   bad judgement, vanity and inexperience—all the ordinary, everyday evils. There is nothing supernatural or mythic at work here. Just the frustration of things not working out.

 

This music was all new to me. Shaw complained that Tchaikovsky had “a thoroughly Byronic power of being tragic, momentous, romantic about nothing at all.” But here there is a clear dramatic point to everything, and the music puts you in the thick of it. Besides Tatiana’s letter, there was Lensky’s farewell aria and Prince Gremin’s deep-voiced praise of love.

 

It sounded great, but the production was not ideal. The principals were miscast. Even given the latitude traditionally permitted opera, Oksana Dyka—a tall, imposing Amazon—couldn’t have been Tatiana’s second cousin; and Dalibor Jenis was impossible to see as a dashing romantic young man. Their costumes exaggerated their inappropriateness in a way that was baffling.

 

The sets were a bit too clever. While I would never object to seeing Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin’s famous 1836 male nude, did Mama Larina really devote a whole wall of her house to a reproduction of it?

 

And though I liked Tatian’s funny half-ellipse nook of a room, after a few splashes I got sick of the giant swimming pool dominating most of the stage. Accomodating these things led to Tatiana’s birthday party—a big, crowded, noisy spectacle—being squeezed onto just the front half of the stage. It looked like castmembers were in danger of tipping over into the orchestra.

 

Worst of all, the desire to create a spooky Caspar David Friedrich effect at the start of Act 3 spoiled Tchaikovsky’s brilliant dramatic effect of ending Act 2 with the sorrowful music of Lensky’s death and beginning Act 3 with the loud, happy music of Prince Gemin’s party.

 

I know the Puskin fanatics dislike the opera as a dumbing-down of their hero’s polyphonic masterpiece. Very likely. But the result is admirable.

 

James Blake & Teengirl Fantasy @ The Music Box

 

 

Before seeing James Blake and his band last night at the Music Box I stopped by Amoeba, where they happened to be serenading the shoppers with vintage Cocteau Twins. It was an omen.

 

The concert turned out to be a heartening sign that people are still seriously pursuing alternative forms of alternative rock. Blake’s disonnant, hookless, sound textures alternated between whispy, fragmented mutterings and heart-stopping thunderous electronic bass blasts. Like the Cocteaus, Blake doesn’t care if you can’t understand the lyrics, couldn’t care less about conventional song structure, and devotes most of his effort to creating strange sonic soundscapes.

 

I remain unconvinced about his capacities as a singer, but there’s no question he is exploring. There were moments that approached conventional blues, country rock, even lounge, but nothing settled into anything conventional for a moment. I kept thinking of The Eagles remixed by Luigi Nono.

 

The evening began with Teengirl Fantasy, i.e. two guys surrounded by all their sound equipment having a ball on stage. They were fantastic. They presented a high-energy half-hour set that deployed all sorts of dance beats but superimposed them and fragmented them in a way that frustrated simple getting down. They never dropped the complex polyrthymns, and contrasting textures. It was like a commentary on dance music rather than anything to dance to. Like a lot of the music at the Music Box last night, it would have been perfectly at home across town at Disney Hall.

 

 

 

Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child

 

It’s a very angry book. A howl against the obliteration of youth, passion, fun, lust, life, … especially as they relate to gay men. Obliterated by time, decay, forgetfulness and above all by prudery and shame, which is to say idiocy.

 

So it is not a light frolic. The first section is deliberately seductive so that the subsequent sections contrast strikingly as shabby, fake, fallings-away from the original light and truth. It’s a long hard plunge straight down.

 

The April 1926 party section read as a nightmare, as it was no doubt intended to be. And we watch as Daphne evolves from a precocious young girl to a confused old drunk. There was a moment in 1926 when she was still sympathetic, but that moment came and went. She would not be another one of Hollinghurst’s sympathetically-observed tragic rich girls. There is no redemption.

 

It is a grimly pessimistic refutation of Proust: The Past Not Recaptured. None of the survivors has the capacity to recapture the reality of the lost past. The story is full of novelists, historians, biographers, … but they are all either too dim, or too committed to some self-serving version of history. No one is permitted a private revelation; no one is permitted any insight into the lives of anyone else.

 

AH’s diction has become remarkably clear and pure: 564 pages without a strained or false note—except intended ones.

 

[Image, Blake, Illustration for Dante’s Purgatorio, 1826-7]

 

Trojan Women @ Malibu Getty

 

Siti Company’s production of Trojan Women at the Getty Villa last night was a brave and harrowing experiment. I disliked their text for domesticating Euripides, but the presentation was excellent. I can’t imagine how some scenes could have been done better. Not a nice evening diversion, but a raw and overwhelming jolt for this memorial weekend.

 

Though, as always, it was a treat to sit in the moonlight in the cool seaside air. 

 

The performance was admirably stripped down: nine actors, no sets, just a few chairs for props, unostentatious lighting and music. The five main characters were on stage most of the time. There were no theatrical tricks. It focused attention on the performances and the words.

 

In this context, Makela Spielman’s performance as Andromache blazed. The gradual building up of her terror over her infant son was harrowing, and probably the high point of the evening.

 

Ellen Lauren’s Hecuba was a triumph—she was on stage the whole time, and maintained maximum violence and maximum expression for 100 minutes without a strained sound or gesture.

 

Unfortunately not everybody was up to Spielman and Lauren’s level.

 

Though Katherine Crockett as Helen had a confrontation with her estranged husband Menelaus (J. Ed Araiza) in which she was exasperating in the most beautiful and appropriate way.

 

And Akiko Aizawa had a spectacular moment as Kassandra, running deep inside the museum yelling at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing off the marble walls and floors (I've always wanted to do this).

 

But the voices all needed to be beautiful, and they weren’t.

 

The real problem was the text—compiled by Anne Bogart and Jocelyn Clarke. It sounded as if it had come largely from the translation of Richard Lattimore, who was always clear and colloquial, but had a tin ear.

 

Christian Frederickson’s violin and electronics provided a subtle and effective background, but it was hard, last night, to discern that we were listening to a work that had originally been intensely musical.

 

The music was missed because not much happens in Euripides’ play. It is essentially an airport drama, with the entrances and exits of Kassandra, Andromache, and Helen providing the only action.

 

But Euripides was enough of a showman to create entrances splashy and dramatic enough for the biggest ham performer. He also provides a straightforward structure for the play: a character comes out, interacts with Hecuba and the Chorus, and is immediately dragged off to a Greek ship. Then the next one comes out.

 

Unfortunately this clarity got blurred to accommodate some extra material, some of which was effective (Odysseus’ walk-on at the end), some inexcusable (making Andromache kill her own son). And even the splashiest of the entrances--Kassandra running onstage carrying torches while screaming and laughing for joy--was botched. They even botched the final exit. Instead of Hecuba being led off to a ship like everyone else, the production permitted her to indulge her grief in peace. The pointed brutality of the original exit was lost.

 

Then there were the big changes.

 

I don’t expect textual fidelity (I don’t expect to listen to Greek, though that would be nice). The performers have a responsibility to make the play work with the audience here and now, and Euripides and the scholars can go hang. But I get exasperated when people make decisions that amount to self-sabotage.

 

Didn’t anyone notice that changing the chorus into a eunuch priest of Cybele, eliminated the group of Trojan women identified in the play’s title? Someday Pedro Almadóvar will probably stage a 100% transsexual production of TW, but last night I felt this priest/chorus/slave/whatever character just pointlessly disrupted the simplicity of the pattern--the contrast between the defeated women of Troy and the victorious men of Greece.  

 

According to the program, one reason for this was that Bogart and Clarke wanted to focus the action on the “domestic drama,” which would be fine for Three Sisters. But this play is about the public scandal of women, dragged out of their homes, being abused and humiliated in public, in front of an audience of other women.

 

The program also notes that the adaptors wanted to contrast the Greeks with their Olympian gods, with the Trojans and their “goddess of fertility.” This kind of stuff would be harmless except for the way it undercut Hecuba’s dilemma by implying that she and the other women had access to a spiritual consolation.

 

But spiritual consolation is exactly what Euripides does not allow. He goes out of his way to make clear in this play that whatever the gods might be, their sense of right and wrong is inscrutable to humans, and they offer no help or solace.Euripides makes this clear from the start, by providing a prologue in which Poseidon and Athena discuss the Trojan defeat like self-absorbed millionaires whose only concern is maintaining their personal perqs. This was too much for Bogart and Clarke, so they eliminated Athena entirely, and retained only Poseidon’s grieving for Troy.

 

In this context, the triumphs of Spielman and Lauren, and the other excellent moments were even more admirable.

 

It was a moving & timely reminder of the chaos war sets in motion.

 

What a wonderful thing, that there is such a beautiful venue in L.A. that even tries to put on plays like Trojan Women!

 

P.S. Next year, more Euripides: Helen. Has the Getty given up entirely on comedy? What about Terence or Menander?

 

Also, there’s a 1971 movie version by Mihalis Kakogiannis (who died last July), with Hepburn, Redgrave & Papas that I've never seen, but looks wild:

 

 

 

[Image: Antonio Tempesta, Greeks carrying away Hecuba, 1606]

 

 

Leo Tolstoy to Strakhov, 9 April 1876

 

Thank you, dear Kikolay Nikolayevich, for sending The Works of Apollon Grigoryev. I read the introduction but—don’t be angry with me—I feel that I could never read it all through if I were incarcerated in a dungeon. This is not because I don’t appreciate Grigoryev—on the contrary—but because criticism is to me the most boring of all boring things in the world. In clever art criticism everything is the truth, but not the whole truth, and art is only art because it is whole.

 

[Da Vinci, A copse of trees, circa 1508]

 

Leo Tolstoy to Boborykin, July/August 1865

 

Problems of the emancipation of women and of literary parties inevitably appear to you important in your literary Petersburg milieu, but all these problems splash about in a little puddle of dirty water which only seems like an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle.

 

The aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.

 

If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours’ work to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about 20 years’ time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life and all my energies to it.

 

[Da Vinci, Blackberry bush, circa 1506]

 

Goodbye to our Henri Rousseau

Trying to digest the news that George Kuchar has died. The freedom, the mania, ... plus, with all the sweat and camp, a gentleness, a sweetness. 

The image is not from George, but from The Tales of Hoffman, that I happened to be watching tonight. No doubt it was an influence. Mystery, artifice, pretending ... can be values.

Gilbert Seldes wrote that what was great about the Keystone Cops movies, was "their immediate creation of the atmosphere of lunatic fantasy.” The same applies to GK. 

A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Cornish Homes and Customs

 

Most of these cottage properties were held under the peculiar terms of a lease dependent on ‘lives,’ a system which, until recent years, obtained very widely in Cornwall. Under such leases a piece of waste ground could be obtained at a nominal rent, and on it the lessee would proceed to erect a house, with the understanding that at the death of the longest-lived of three selected persons, the ground, together with the building and improvements effected thereon, should revert to the original owner.

 

[Image: E. McKnight Kauffer, 1932]

 

Leo Tolstoy to Fet, 16 May 1865

 

We have pink radishes on our table, yellow butter, and soft, well-baked bread on a clean table-cloth; the garden is green and our young ladies in muslin dresses are glad it is hot and shady; but elsewhere the evil devil famine is already at work, covering the fields with goose-foot, causing cracks to appear in the dried-up earth, chafing the calloused heels of the peasants and their women, cracking the hooves of the cattle and penetrating everywhere and causing such havoc to everyone that even our people under their shady lime tries in their muslin dresses and with their yellow creamy butter on a painted dish will feel the effects, I think.

 

[Image: Miró, Vines Tarragona, 1919]

 

Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: the United States, 1885-1890

 

She had a stand for the sale of fruit.

It was hot that day

and she seated herself in the shade of the building

upon the first step of the stairs

that led to a fish market in the basement.

A wagon, loaded with ice, stopped in front of the building.

The iceman took a cake of ice,

weighing about fifty or sixty pounds,

from the cool, dark inside of the wagon

full of cakes of ice,

and slung it over his shoulders

to carry it down to the fish market.

 

As he was going down the stairs,

the cake of ice slipped from his tongs

and fell upon her hand

resting on the step.

 

[Image: Agnes Martin, Unit, 1959]